Judicial Watch Obtains Secret White House Document Revealing Obamacare Rollout Disaster

Once again a private watchdog organization has outperformed the feckless, bumbling House committee chairmen. With all due respect.

I'm looking at you, Darrell Issa. To wit, "Judicial Watch Obtains 106-Page HHS Document Revealing Scope of Obamacare Rollout Disaster."

Judicial Watch today released a 106-page document obtained on May 1 from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), revealing that on its first full day of operation, October 1, 2013, Obamacare’s Healthcare.gov received only one enrollment. The document, obtained in response to a November 25, 2013, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against HHS, also reveals that on the second day of Healthcare.gov operation, 48% of registrations failed...

...The full extent of the failure, however, is reflected in the details provided by the Judicial Watch FOIA document revelations. They include:

• On October 1, there were 43,208 accounts created and 1 enrollment. (Page 49)

• As of October 31, 2013, there were 1,319,425 accounts created nationwide – but only 30,512 actual enrollments in Obamacare. (Page 19)

• On October 1, 2013, at the end of the first day (4:30), the Senior Advisor at Center forConsumer Information and Insurance Oversight, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Brigid M. Russell, sent out an email to her staff with a subject line celebrating “2 enrollments!” The body copy of the email read: “We have our second official FFM enrollment! The first two Form 834s sent out are to: 1) CareSource in Ohio, 2) BCBS of North Carolina. (Page 90)

• Official figures contained in the HHS report provide conflicting figures as to the number of enrollments. FFM [Federally Facilitated Marketplace] statistics show 23,259 cumulative to-date applications submitted as of 10/2/13 and 286 completed plan selections. Earlier numbers show 356 enrollments created as of 7pm on 10/2/13 that were completed with Form 834s sent. (Pages 91-92)

• An October 2, 2013, email from HHS Special Assistant Marianne Bowen indicated serious problems with congressional enrollments: “The Congressional issue (68 attempts for Direct enrollment) was an issue stemming from incomplete applications being sent through (started, not finished, sent anyway) and the way the issuers are assigning unique numbers. Turns out there were only 4 complete Direct Enrollment applications that went through, the other 64 were not complete.” (Page 93) [The U.S. Congress has approximately 24,000 professional staffers.]

• On October 2, 2013, the Obamacare website had 70,000 page views but only 5,000 were unique visitors, and 48% of registrations failed. The large number of page views may have been the result of visitors repeatedly hitting the “refresh” button due to long waiting times. (Page 106)

On April 17, 2014, President Obama announced that eight million people had signed up for health insurance on Affordable Healthcare Act exchanges. That figure, however, may be substantially over-inflated. According to testimony in May by the America’s Health Insurance Plans association before the House Commerce Committee Subcommittee on Oversight, “Because of the challenges that surfaced with the launch of the Exchanges in October 2013, some consumers were advised to create a new account and enroll again. As a result, insurers have many duplicate enrollments in their system for which they never received any payment.”

Kudos to Judicial Watch. I wish John Boehner and the rest of his useless Committee Chairmen were one-tenth as effective.


Hat tip: BadBlue News.