Anyone truly surprised?
The shell game has already started on the first day for Obamacare enrollment.
The Obama administration said, “it wouldn’t release any data on how many people enrolled Tuesday for the embattled healthcare reform program,” but early indications show it consisted of crickets and sage brush.
Predictably, Marilyn Tavenner, administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, or CMS, said “We’re not releasing that information yet, we will be releasing enrollment statistics regularly, but we can confirm that people have enrolled both through the state marketplace and the federally facilitated marketplace,” according to The Daily Caller.
Tavenner went on to say, “I would just point to historical experience getting data and what we have seen with other implementation efforts over time and we know that it takes some time to pull accurate data and information together, so we will be able to do that for you as soon as we can, and we’ll make sure we let you know what that schedule will be.”
That is code for very little traffic.
However, USA Today wrote that only 24 people had enrolled in the Connecticut exchange by noon Tuesday, while an exchange in Kentucky had processed only 1,000.
CMS reports that 2.8 million people have visited healthcare.gov since midnight Tuesday and 81,000 calls had been logged.
Here are some of the numbers actually publicized:
– Connecticut reported 11,000 visitors, its first customer at 9:30 a.m. with a grand total of 24 by noon.
– Florida reported Blue Cross and Blue Shield added five building centers and doubled the direct sales force (taxpayer funded).
– Kentucky’s website had 24,000 visitors after midnight processing nearly 1,000.
– Maryland reported 90,000 people had visited the site crashing it.
– New Mexico enrolled 29 businesses within the first 45 minutes.
– New York reported cited 2 million visitors in the first 90 minutes.
It will take weeks, if not months to gauge the success or failure of the new healthcare law.
