One quarter of the sign-ups came through the flawed HealthCare.gov site. | REUTERS October Obamacare enrollment low

Only 106,000 people signed up for coverage in the new Obamacare exchanges as of Nov. 2, administration officials announced in the first official update of enrollment since the law’s disastrous Oct. 1 launch.

One-quarter of those people came through the flawed HealthCare.gov site, which is used by 36 states. The rest selected plans in the 14 states and the District of Columbia that are running their own health insurance exchanges, most of which are operating much better than the federal site.


The numbers are the first official glimpse of the damage caused by the tech failures with the law’s enrollment portal HealthCare.gov, and they fall well short of the administration’s early goal of having about a half-million sign up in the first month. The administration is hoping to get 7 million people signed up in the exchanges and at least 8 million in Medicaid by the time the open enrollment season ends March 31.

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Even those first-year goals are arguably modest: There are about 47 million uninsured people in the country, although that includes undocumented immigrants ineligible for Obamacare coverage.

The White House has been tamping down expectations for weeks, warning that they have always expected the first month of enrollment to be low, even before the gravity of the website problems became clear.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius maintained that the system is beginning to work, albeit slowly. “Even with the issues we’ve had, the marketplace is working and people are enrolling,” she told reporters on a call.

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“We can reasonably expect that these numbers will grow substantially over the next five months,” she added.

Republicans pointed out that the sign-up numbers are puny compared with the millions of Americans who are receiving cancellation notices and losing the health plans that the president promised they could keep.

“Pretty stunning” is how House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) summed it up on CNN. “Just another day in a series of mess-ups in Obamacare.”

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) said everyone who had signed up nationwide could fit into the University of Tennessee stadium “and still have room for the ‘Pride of the Southland’ marching band.” He added, “That’s bad news for the 5 million Americans who’ve had their policies canceled by Obamacare.”

The statistics HHS released Wednesday afternoon included people who had selected their health plan — but not necessarily paid for it, the final step in enrollment. People have until Dec. 15 to pay for coverage starting in January.

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An additional 392,000 people were deemed eligible for either Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program under the law. And in what advocates of the law pointed to as an encouraging sign, close to 1 million — 975,407 people — had made it through the process of applying and confirming their eligibility, although they had not yet selected plans.

Anne Filipic, president of Enroll America, said in a statement the larger numbers of people in the pipeline “confirm what we have been expecting — the problems with the website have indeed slowed enrollment, but Americans are hungry for the affordable, comprehensive coverage.”

The administration did not release details on the demographics of those who enrolled, what kind of insurance plan they chose or whether they qualified for subsidies. A well-functioning insurance market needs healthy, younger participants to balance the costs of older and sicker ones, but the numbers released Wednesday gave no hint of early trends or eventual sustainability. Sebelius said such information would be included in future reports.

Almost a third of all the exchange sign-ups came from California, a state the White House indicated will play a large role in shaping the law’s trajectory. Shortly after the HHS announcement, Covered California, the state exchange, updated its own tally, 60,000 as of Nov. 12. The federal count went through Nov. 2.

Executive Director Peter Lee said the pace had doubled from October, with 2,000 now selecting a plan each day.

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The administration is placing a heavy emphasis on enrollments in California, Florida and Texas, which are home to one-third of the nation’s uninsured. Sign-ups in Florida and Texas, which are relying on the federal exchange, were much lower — 3,571 and 2,991, respectively.

Jonathan Gruber, an MIT economics professor who advised policymakers crafting the Massachusetts health law and Obamacare, said he doesn’t think the enrollment numbers are “disappointing.” He noted that the Massachusetts exchange enrolled only 123 people in the first month. By that measure, he said, the federal government is doing well.

“It’s just too early to say anything useful,” Gruber said on CNN. In Massachusetts, enrollment surged at the end of the enrollment period, which is probably what people will do on the Obamacare exchanges, Gruber said.

“There’s no need to panic,” he said.

Paige Winfield Cunningham contributed to this report.