Healthcare.gov Is on Track to Miss Its Enrollment Deadlines
Users are still experiencing issues with the federal exchange.
Experts predict that the federal government has about a month to get Healthcare.gov in fighting shape if it wants to get 7 million people enrolled in its first year, Reuters reported on Monday. Users are still experiencing issues with the federal exchange, which puts enrollment numbers at risk and gives Republicans more reason to say the law should have been delayed.
While state-run exchanges have been running relatively smoothly and enrolling thousands, the federal government, which runs exchanges for 36 states, has declined to say how many individuals have enrolled in insurance plans. Anonymous sources in the Department of Health and Human Services told the Daily Mail that there were just 51,000 completed applications during the program's first week. That's not a lot (at that rate it would take over two years to enroll 7 million) but that also means at least 51,000 people eagerly signed up for insurance plans that won't take effect until next year.
Though the federal site is starting to identify and solve its problems, including introducing a very basic plan estimator, people on both sides of the aisle are fed up. "I hope they're working day and night to get this done," Robert Gibbs, President Obama's former press secretary, told MSNBC yesterday. "And when they get it fixed, I hope they fire some people that were in charge of making sure that this thing was supposed to work."
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