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About 100,000 people signed up for health insurance through the online federal exchange last month, a roughly four-fold increase from October even as a team of U.S. government and contractor programmers was fixing the troubled Affordable Care Act website, said a person familiar with program’s progress.
The preliminary November numbers reflect individuals who successfully selected a plan. The administration expects that most consumers will sign up early next year as the enrollment period nears its March 31 close, said the person who asked for anonymity because the final numbers were still being calculated.
After two months of software errors and delays that have threatened the success of President Barack Obama’s signature health law, the administration said yesterday that it met its self-imposed deadline and the site, healthcare.gov, is working smoothly for the majority of users. The fumbled rollout forced the administration to scale back its original enrollment targets of about 800,000 for the first two months.
While far from the original goal, the jump in enrollment may be an encouraging trend for the administration and could signal that consumers are keeping an open mind about the new $1.4 trillion health law amid criticism from both Republicans and Democrats over the site’s technical failures.
The administration continues to stubbornly refuse to provide the numbers of people who have actually purchased a health plan through any Obamafail channel, which, of course, means that the numbers of actual people who have actually signed up is far, far lower than these dismal numbers that they're putting out.