Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell said 100,000 people applied for health insurance coverage Saturday, the first day of Obamacare’s year-two open enrollment.
Burwell said an additional 500,000 people already enrolled in the program “logged in effectively” despite criticism that many existing users were unable to access their accounts on healthcare.gov.
“Some people forget their usernames,” Burwell said, responding to criticism on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “Some people are renewing their passwords and other things. If there are any other technical problems, our customer service folks are ready and able to help people.”
Burwell told host Chuck Todd that customer service representatives took more than 100,000 calls Saturday from people seeking help signing up for insurance.
The second-year launch of open enrollment on healthcare.gov appears to be going much more smoothly than last year, when the initial opening of the website completely failed, requiring hundreds of millions of dollars to fix.
Still, the government has downgraded estimates for signups from 13 million, estimated by the Congressional Budget Office, to less than 10 million.
Burwell said she revised the number because of lower re-enrollment numbers after a survey determined that about 83 percent were going to re-sign.
Burwell said the CBO “actually thought more people would switch from employer-based care than did.”
Burwell also rejected statements made by an Obamacare architect, Jonathan Gruber, who said “the lack of economic understanding of the American voter” was necessary to help pass the law.
Todd played a video of Gruber describing the healthcare legislation, which passed Congress in 2010 with the support of all Democrats with the exception of one House Republican, as “the spaghetti approach, which is, it takes a bunch of ideas that might work and throws them against the wall and we’ll see what sticks.”
But Burwell sidestepped a question by Todd, who wanted to know whether he would be used ever again as a healthcare reform consultant.
“With regard to Mr. Gruber and his comments, I think I’ve been clear. That’s something we fundamentally disagree with.”
