Kathleen Sebelius: 7.5M signed up in Obamacare exchanges

By: Jennifer Haberkorn
April 10, 2014 10:43 AM EDT - POLITICO

At least 7.5 million people have signed up for health coverage through the Obamacare exchanges, and the number is still rising, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said Thursday.

President Barack Obama had said that 7.1 million Americans enrolled as of April 1, but that tally didn’t count all the last-minute enrollment surge numbers from state-run exchanges or the people allowed to complete signup after March 31.

“As of this week, 400,000 additional Americans have signed up and we expect that number to continue to grow,” Sebelius told a Senate Finance Committee hearing. People who had trouble completing their signup by the March 31 deadline were given until April 15 to finish in the federal exchange that serves 36 states. Some states are allowing a longer grace period.

Not everyone who signs up pays their insurance premiums so the final enrollment number is likely to be lower. But these numbers surpassed the White House target of 7 million signups — a projection set by the Congressional Budget Office before the HealthCare.gov website disaster last October. CBO had later revised its estimate to 6 million, but the signup surge blew past that benchmark in late March.

Questions remain about how many people who sought coverage in the exchanges were previously uninsured,and how many had their old coverage cancelled because it didn’t meet Affordable Care Act requirements. Sebelius said she didn’t have clear numbers on either of those points.

“I do not have data to give you right now in terms of who exactly was previously uninsured,” she said in response to a question. She said the agency is collecting that data from insurers and will share it at a future date.

Sebelius cited the recent RAND Corp. study that found 9.3 million people gaining health insurance because of the law, including a spike in people getting insurance through a job.

“And I can tell you those numbers will be much more significant once we tally” the latest enrollments, she said.

Sen. Orrin Hatch, the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, preempted Sebelius’s announcement, blasting the administration’s earlier figure of 7.1 million as merely “claimed enrollees.”

“It’s like Amazon.com taking stock of the people who (put items in their shopping cart) and then counting them as sales. In other words it’s a false metric.”