Just under 27,000 Americans chose – but did not necessarily pay for – health insurance through the federal healthcare.gov website during its first month of operation.
The Department of Health and Human Services reports that from Oct. 1 to Nov. 2, a total of 106,185 people – 26,794 via healthcare.gov and 79,391 via state-based health insurance exchanges – had selected a plan for enrollment. Hundreds of thousands more (396,261) had been determined to be eligible for Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Plan (CHIP). The majority of those (212,865) went through one of the 15 state-based exchanges, while 183,396 got the determination through healthcare.gov, which serves as the health insurance exchange for 36 states.
Kathleen Sebelius
HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a briefing with reporters that the Administration at present could not release the number of people who have paid for insurance. Those data will be available by Dec. 15, which is the deadline for getting coverage that starts Jan. 1.
But the numbers indicate that the "marketplace is working" and that people are enrolling in person, over the phone, and online, Ms. Sebelius said. She added that the data show that people have not bought plans yet are still shopping.
"People want to make sure their doctors are in their network, they want to see what kind of benefits they have, they want to check out options, they want to talk to people," she said. The expectation is that "these numbers will grow substantially over next 5 months."
Physicians may not be aware of whether they are participating in an exchange plan or they may not be participating. A recent survey by the Medical Society of the State of New York found that a third of members weren’t sure if they were in an exchange plan network and another third said they would not participate in an exchange plan.
In an interview, Dr. Stephen L. Brotherton, president of the Texas Medical Association, said that "the street information is different" from what the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services is reporting on what consumers can learn about physician networks.
Meanwhile, Ms. Sebelius said that interest in purchasing health insurance is "reflected in the numbers of people who are seeking information and shopping for plans."
According to the HHS report, there have been about 27 million unique visitors to healthcare.gov and 3.1 million calls to state and federal call centers.
In the first month, 846,184 applications, representing just over 1.5 million Americans, were completed through the state and federal online sites. HHS says that this figure represents about 22% of the estimated 7 million people the Congressional Budget Office said were likely to enroll in a plan in 2014. About a half million people who submitted applications were not eligible for a health insurance exchange plan. Out of the 1 million who have been determined to be eligible, about 106,000 have selected a plan through the federal or state exchanges.
HHS says there were an additional 259,107 paper and phone applications for plans through the federal exchange.
The HHS report found that shopping online was the primary mode for most exchange users. On average, 93% of state exchange applications that were submitted and completed were done electronically. That dropped to 67% for applications submitted and completed through healthcare.gov.
On Nov. 12, CMS officials said that the agency would be sending "waves" of e-mails to some 275,000 people who had tried to get on healthcare.gov in the early weeks and had not succeeded. They also said that the site was currently configured to handle any added demand from people responding to those e-mails.
Ms. Sebelius said that she remains optimistic that enrollment figures will grow. "Will we convert 100%? Probably not, but I don’t think that was ever the expectation," she said.
"But I think a number of the people who are currently in the shopping mode will at the end of the day enroll in coverage."
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