White House STILL won't say how many Obamacare enrollees have paid for plans, but announces 4.2 million total through February – just 60 per cent of original goal

As March 31 deadline approaches, the administration is nowhere near its original goal of 7 million signups – or its revised target of 6 million

But the administration hasn't said how many have paid their premiums, claming their accounts-payable system isn't yet set up to compute totals



Seven U.S. states, however, have released their paid/unpaid numbers, and those figures indicate that just 3.3 million have paid for insurance



The White House has asked insurers to cut delinquent enrollees some slack, but some insurance execs say they won't do it

A troubling survey from a health care consultancy found last week that just 27 per cent of enrollees were previously uninsured



As of March 1 about 4.2 million Americans had signed up for medical insurance coverage through the Affordable Care Act, according to numbers released Tuesday by the Obama administration. But it remains unclear how many of those enrollees have put their money where their mouse is.

Combined figures published by Obamacare marketplaces in California, Connecticut, Maryland, Nevada, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington indicate that just 79 per cent of signups in those states have come with checks attached.

If those numbers were to hold up nationally, it would mean that about 1.1 million Obamacare enrollees have selected insurance plans without paying for them – bringing the actual total of Obamacare-insured Americans down to 3.3 million.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius continues to plug the Obamacare insurance coverage system despite enrollment numbers that have been less than expected

Desperate or smart? On Tuesday the White House defended its decision to send President Barack Obama out to do an interview with 'Funny or Die' mini-show host Zach Galifinakis, saying the satire website immediately became the number-one online referrer to healthcare.gov

The Newark Star-Ledger reported in late February that 'at least three-quarters' of plans sold by three insurers in New Jersey have been paid for.



February brought 943,000 new people into the Obamacare fold, bringing the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services 60 per cent of the way to the Department of Health and Human Services' original goal of enrolling 7 million Americans by the end of March.

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told reporters on a conference call Tuesday that the administration expects a March surge to close the gap.

Last month she backed off from the prediction of 7 million new insurance customers, saying the new target was 6 million. The 4.2 million total is 70 per cent of that lower benchmark number.

The reconfiguration of the administration's goal came after a chronically ill beginning for Obamacare, marked by national confusion, website outages and an implementation cost that has exceeded two-thirds of 1 trillion dollars.

About one-quarter of the enrollees since the program's October 1 launch have been adults in the 18-35 age range. Those desirable, mostly healthy people were originally expected to be one-third of the total, paying into the system to offset the staggering costs of treating older, sicker Americans.

As the March 31 deadline ending the open-enrollment season approaches, the White House has yet to release any statistics showing how many people have paid the first month's premium for their new insurance policies.

Andale! Obama promoted his signature health insurance law in a town-hall event for Hispanic-Americans at the Newseum in Washington, D.C> on March 6

Controversy: Restaurants like Gator's Dockside in Clermont, Florida have begun adding 1-percent Affordable Care Act surcharges to customers' checks in order to pay for the increasing cost of coverage under the new law

A Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services spokesman told MailOnline last month that the agency hasn't 'prioritized' reporting its payment statistics, but plans to do so 'once our automated payment systems are completed and fully tested.'

CMS manages health insurance exchanges for 14 states and the District of Columbia.

All together, the seven states where both enrollment and payment numbers have been published have signed up 1.05 million people, but reported that just 835,000 have paid premiums.

More troubling for the Obama administration is a survey published last week by the consultancy McKinsey & Co., which found that only 27 per cent of new enrollees – or 1.14 million of the total announced Tuesday – were uninsured before they signed up.

Millions of insured Americans received cancellation letters from their insurers in October, November and December, spurred by the companies' recognition that their existing offerings didn't satisfy the Affordable Care Act's stringent minimum standards.

Mixed messages: A smaller percentage of Americans are uninsured than 6 months or a year ago, but the number has gone up overall during the Obama presidency

Those requirements include a host of coverage options – maternity coverage required for male customers, for instance – that critics say policyholders shouldn't have to pay for.

McKinsey also found that just 1 in 10 Americans who are eligible for Obamacare policies have chosen to enroll.



Adding insult to injury, a Gallup poll released Monday shows that while the percentage of uninsured Americans has dropped from 17.1 per cent at the end of 2013 to just 15.9 per cent now, that number stood at just 14.4 per cent before Obama took office.



It's also not clear what will happen to taxpayers whose have not made payments by March 31.

