Officials for Oregon's health insurance exchange on Thursday reported some progress, but acknowledged a major fix to the problem-plagued site may not happen this month as hoped.The website still has not enrolled anyone.

Programmers for Cover Oregon are grappling with flaws that have blocked enrollment for the new health insurance exchange.

Earlier this month officials at Cover Oregon said they expected the site to let insurance agents and certified application assisters to enroll people by Halloween.

Spokesman Michael Cox said that timeline is now a goal, rather than an expectation. "We're not going to rush out a system that we are not satisfied with."

The latest update on timing of the fix -- arguably the biggest facing coveroregon.com -- comes after the site initially was supposed to let consumers enroll themselves beginning Oct. 1. That was changed to letting only insurance agents and application assisters enroll people through the site. Then the state announced that plan, too, would be postponed, but that the problem preventing agents from enrolling clients likely would be fixed by the end of October.

"We could have made the decision to go out with the website Oct 1, bugs and all," Cox said. Instead the exchange decided focus on providing accurate information to people who want to know if they are eligible for government assistance, such as income-based tax credits to reduce premiums, or the Oregon Health Plan.

Cover Oregon also reported that a long-awaited

Cover Oregon also released some statistics, after previously denying them to reporters:

-As of Wednesday, Cover Oregon has processed 34 paper applications to determine if people were eligible for financial assistance. These applications were not processed by the website, but by hand starting Oct. 15.

-Six applicants qualified for tax credits to bring down the cost of premiums. The remaining 28 applications appear to be eligible for the Medicaid-funded Oregon Health Plan.

- So far, 4,260 paper applications to determine eligibility for assistance have been received. Also, agents and application assisters have created 2,459 electronic customer accounts so they can check eligibility for financial assistance once problems with the website are fixed. That's a total of 6,719 applications. Since some represent families, the applications represented approximately 11,500 Oregonians, officials said.

- The exchange continues to attract strong interest with number of visits topping 470,000. As of last week, each unique visitor visited 1.5 times, suggesting the current number of unique visitors is roughly 300,000.

In other news, the Obama administration gave six more weeks to individual consumers who otherwise faced a penalty if they didn't finish applying for coverage by Feb. 15, allowing it to be processed by March 15. Now they must finish applying by coverage by March 31 to avoid a penalty, according to Kaiser Health News.



--Nick Budnick