White House says 106,000 enrolled in health insurance

That's a far cry from the 500,000 the administration was expecting

The Obama administration finally released much anticipated data on healthcare enrollment on Wednesday, and the numbers are predictably low. Some 106,000 people signed up for health insurance via Healthcare.gov and other state-run health exchange websites during the month of October, which is about one-fifth of the total number the Obama administration was expecting. (That staticky noise you’re hearing would be the cheers of thousands of Tea Partiers across the country in unison.)

Of those 106,000 new enrollees, only 27,000 came from the federally run Healthcare.gov website, which is the default platform for 36 states. Healthcare.gov has been infamously riddled with problems since launch, so it comes as no surprise that some three-quarters of all enrollees for the month of October signed up for health plans through the 15 state-run websites.

Previous reports indicated that only 40,000 to 50,000 people had enrolled during the month of October.

But the data is a little tricky. The Obama administration is including in those numbers people who have filled out applications but have not yet agreed to a plan. The administration is only considering those who have “selected a marketplace plan.” But obviously, coverage doesn’t start until a customer agrees to pay.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said Wednesday that while just 106,000 have enrolled, another 975,000 have started the application process without having selected a plan yet. An additional 396,000 applicants were found to be eligible for Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

Reports have indicated that the site’s administrators are having to go through the site with a fine-toothed comb, because just when they’ve fixed one technical problem early in the enrollment process, other problems pop up later in the process.

On the day before launch, a technical report revealed that at that moment, the site could only handle a maximum of 1,100 users before response time became too high. The team working on the site said in the report that they were going to keep running tests to get the website to a capacity of 10,000 concurrent users. The federal government was anticipating 50,000 to 60,000 concurrent users on launch day. How many did they get? About 250,000 concurrent users.

“There is no doubt the level of interest is strong,” Sebelius said in a statement. “We expect enrollment will grow substantially throughout the next five months, mirroring the pattern that Massachusetts experienced.”

The Obama administration has frequently referenced Massachusetts’ experience in implementing a statewide health exchange. Of the 36,167 people who signed up for health insurance during the first open enrollment period when Massachusetts expanded its health law, only 123 did so during the first month. A full 7,000 enrolled during the final month. But then again, Massachusetts was only counting those who had agreed to pay.

The open enrollment period for state and federal health marketplaces ends March 31, 2014. Budget forecasters have projected that some 7 million people would enroll during that time period.