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Health insurance

1 million apply on HealthCare.gov in first week

Jayne O'Donnell
USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — About 1 million out of the more than 3.7 million people who logged into HealthCare.gov during the first week of open enrollment submitted applications, the Department of Health and Human Services said Wednesday.

Nearly a half-million of those selected plans.

The HealthCare,gov website offers insurance options.

HHS Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell called the first week's statistics a "solid start" but noted the government has "a lot of work to do every day between now and Feb. 15," the end of the open enrollment period. A week after the agency came under fire for misstating enrollment figures by including those who signed up for dental plans, Burwell said, "Those numbers have been checked and do not include dental."

Almost half — 48% — of those who chose plans were uninsured, Burwell said. One of the administration's goals during the three-month open enrollment period is to reduce the number of people without insurance. Another goal is encouraging those with insurance to shop around for better deals.

"The fact that a substantial number of people were able to get on HealthCare.gov and pick a plan in the first week shows that the systems are working," said Larry Levitt, senior vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation. "That's a big deal when you consider what a mess it all was last fall."

The site is monitored constantly for possible problems, which are addressed quickly, said Andy Slavitt, HHS principal deputy administrator. He described fixes as "the kind of tuning adjustments you make" after a site goes live.

USA TODAY interviewed insurance agents and consumers in states including New Jersey, Illinois, Louisiana and Texas who couldn't access the federal health insurance exchange for long periods during the first few days, but Slavitt denied there had been any "outages."

Kevin Sterneckert, a retail website expert and former analyst for the research firm Gartner, defined an outage as when "customers are not able to access the content maintained by the servers."

"You can have the main website pages (screens) working, but the databases are down; that is an outage," said Sterneckert, chief marketing officer of the retail commerce company OrderDynamics. "When everything is down, that's a catastrophic outage."

Brian Shannon of Brick, N.J., couldn't access HealthCare.gov the first weekend and called in his renewal to the call center. He later got messages from the site telling him he could log in, but he couldn't enter the area to renew coverage because he had already done so.

Lawrence Mayka of Aurora, Ill., couldn't log in the first weekend and got an automated message that said, "Sorry, there's a problem with our system."

Slavitt said there have been "a couple of times, and I'm sure there will be other times, when we put people into a waiting room" online because of a technical issue or because consumers would get a better experience later. People have the option to go into the window shopping part of the site, where they can browse but not buy plans.

"We know we have more work to do every day," Slavitt said.

The HHS report showed that wait times holding for the call center averaged slightly more than three minutes. Ronnell Nolan, CEO of Health Agents for America, said the longest hold reported by one of her members was one hour and 45 minutes.

The "real test' of whether HHS is meeting its enrollment targets will come closer to Dec. 15, the deadline for coverage that starts Jan. 1 or when open enrollment ends Feb. 15, Levitt said. That's the deadline to sign up to avoid penalties for not having insurance.

"Just like stores get more and more crowded as the holidays approach, enrollment will likely surge in the final days that people can sign up for insurance," he said.

Slavitt said HealthCare.gov will be prepared to handle last-minute surges. He expects about 80% of those with plans to return to re-enroll. Those with coverage will be enrolled in their current plans automatically if they do nothing, but they will miss the chance to get lower rates and update income information so subsidies are accurate.

HHS has new partnerships with the Westfield mall company, the National Community Pharmacists Association and the wedding and birth information online company XO Group to assist consumers with open enrollment, said Kevin Counihan, CEO of HealthCare.gov and the former head of Connecticut's health care exchange.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the HHS agency in charge of open enrollment, plans to release an enrollment report every month.

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