WASHINGTON -- About 462,000 people signed up for 2015 insurance coverage under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in the first week the federal enrollment system was open for business, the government said Wednesday, confirming a turnaround for the program in its second year.
The government released the first of what it said would be weekly snapshots of health insurance sign-ups for the Affordable Care Act. Enrollment in plans began Nov. 15 and ends Feb. 15. The tally only includes people who signed up for coverage through the federally run program, while 13 states run their own sign-up systems.
"It's still early and we have a long way to go, but we're off to a solid start," U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell said during a conference call with reporters.
Last year, the online system people use to shop and sign up for plans collapsed on its first day of business and was followed by months of delays and errors. Anchored by healthcare.gov, the system was rebuilt this year and put under new leadership.
"We believe for the vast majority of consumers they're having a faster, better, more intuitive experience," said Andy Slavitt, the principal deputy administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which runs the website.
"There have been bumps. Some of them were first-day issues such as consumers forgetting passwords or user names. Some of the issues are the kind of tuning adjustments that you make when you go into a live environment," he said on the conference call.
The administration's goal is to cover 9.1 million people next year through the state and federal program, compared with 6.7 million as of last month. That 9.1 million goal is lower than initial estimates, as government analysts said fewer people than expected are moving from plans they get through work into the U.S. system.
In the first month of last year's sign-up period, slightly more than 500,000 people completed insurance applications through the federal marketplace, and nearly 30,000 then went on to choose a health plan.
The new figures show that this time, in the first week, just more than 1 million people completed applications and almost half of them picked a health plan.
Of the 462,125 people who chose health insurance plans, 48 percent were new customers, while the rest were renewing health insurance under the program.
Wednesday's data do not contain any breakdowns among the states in the federal exchange -- or, among people renewing coverage, how many are keeping their current health plans and how many are switching to different ones.
Burwell said her department's weekly reports on healthcare.gov performance will fluctuate and can't be added together to track enrollment. The Health and Human Services Department will issue monthly reports with total sign-ups at the federal and state-run insurance exchanges, she said.
The department has come under scrutiny after it said it erroneously inflated enrollment last year by about 400,000, incorrectly counting people with dental plans to push total enrollment over 7 million. That mishap has led to criticism from Republicans and calls by Burwell for increased transparency.
The data from the first week of the latest enrollment period "have been checked and do not include dental," the secretary said Wednesday, adding that staff members are continuing to examine how the erroneous figures were provided to the public.
The data also indicate that federal call centers, with staff members trained to answer questions for people considering insurance through the marketplaces, have so far been able to keep up with consumers. The average wait to speak with a staff member was just over three minutes.
Slavitt said that since healthcare.gov opened this month there have not been any times when it was unavailable because of computer problems -- a common occurrence last fall. By Wednesday afternoon, he said, the website's busiest period consisted of about 55,000 people using it simultaneously -- far below the 250,000 capacity it is now supposed to be able to accommodate. Still, there have been two occasions so far, he said, when insurance seekers on certain parts of the site were steered into an online waiting room for brief periods.
He predicted that the website will be able to handle big upswings in traffic that, in light of last year's experiences, are expected to occur as two deadlines approach: Dec. 15 for people to renew coverage so that it will continue for next year and Feb. 15 for the end of the three-month enrollment window -- half as long as last year's.
Earlier this year, the Obama administration decided that after Dec. 15, it would renew automatically the coverage of anyone who bought insurance on healthcare.gov for this year and had not taken steps by then to continue or change their health plans for 2015.
Still, health officials have been urging everyone who already has coverage to return to the website to update information about their incomes and any changes that would affect their insurance or its prices, and to compare their current coverage with other health plans available to them.
Meanwhile, at a time when federal officials are eager for more Hispanics to become insured, the volume of calls from people requesting a Spanish-speaking representative has been relatively light. So has the number of people browsing health plans on a Spanish-language section of the federal insurance website.
Nearly one-fourth of Hispanics are uninsured, according to the Census Bureau.
One problem could be awareness. The Kaiser Family Foundation, which has tracked consumer attitudes about the health law since before its passage, said in an October survey that about nine of 10 uninsured people didn't know when enrollment in Affordable Care Act plans began.
Kevin Counihan, the chief executive of the federal insurance marketplace, said Wednesday that the administration would work with three organizations to help consumers understand how they can sign up for coverage under the health care law.
He identified the groups as Westfield Corp., which runs 40 shopping malls that serve 425 million people in the U.S.; the National Community Pharmacists Association; and the XO Group, a media company that caters to women who are engaged, newly married or pregnant.
The government's enrollment push with Westfield will involve setting up outreach tables at malls in Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, Connecticut, Maryland, New York and Washington state. Separately, the California insurance marketplace, Covered California, will work with Westfield malls in that state.
Enrollment counselors at the malls will advise people on how to sign up and point them to locations, including in the shopping centers, where they can sign up.
The Health and Human Services Department also will work with pharmacies to advise people on how they can enroll in plans.
Information for this article was contributed by Alex Wayne of Bloomberg News; by Amy Goldstein of The Washington Post; by Robert Pear of The New York Times; and by Carla K. Johnson of The Associated Press.
A Section on 11/27/2014