3 On Your Side: Enrollment Numbers Very Low For Healthcare.gov Launch
By Jim Donovan
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- One month after the rollout of the Healthcare.gov website, we may have some clues as to why the government won't release early enrollment figures. 3 On Your Side Consumer Reporter Jim Donovan has been following this story all month and tells us that while millions of people attempted to enroll, very few were successful.
Early on we were told that there were 4.7 million unique visits to the site during its first 24 fours. Sounds impressive. But of that number only six people nationwide actually enrolled and that number didn't improve much.
CBS News has obtained early enrollment figures for Healthcare.gov turned over to the house oversight committee. They show that only 248 people enrolled in the first two days. The figures are contained in notes from twice-a-day "war room" meetings convened within the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services after the website failed on October 1. The notes were turned over in response to a document request from the House Oversight Committee.
Experts say the Healthcare exchanges need to average 39,000 enrollees a day to meet the goal of seven million insured Americans by March 31st.
Meanwhile Pennsylvania Republican Senator Pat Toomey visiting CBS 3 today, said he'll meet with Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius next week and wants to know more about the website's security. He says, "We know this website is badly flawed in many ways and it sort of routinely fails. Why should we be confident that they've done what needs to be done to protect the privacy of the data that people are required to provide? I haven't gotten any satisfactory answer to that yet and I'm going to ask Secretary Sebelius to address that."
In the meantime, the White House says it will release official enrollment figures for the Healthcare.gov site later this month.
