WASHINGTON — Playing catch-up with a long way to go, President Barack Obama’s new health insurance markets last month picked up the dismal pace of signups, the administration reported Wednesday.
Enrollment statistics from the Health and Human Services Department showed that 364,682 people have signed up for private coverage as of Nov. 30 under the federal health law. Although that’s more than three times the October total, it’s less than one-third of the 1.2 million people officials had originally projected would enroll nationwide by the end of November.
Crunch time is now for Obama’s health care law, as consumers face a Dec. 23 enrollment deadline if they want to have coverage on Jan. 1. Yet HealthCare.gov, the revamped federal website serving 36 states, continues to have issues. Just Tuesday there was an extended maintenance outage. And some states running their own websites are also having problems.
That’s created stress and uncertainty not only for the uninsured but also for consumers seeking to avoid an interruption in coverage in January. Those trying to preserve coverage include some or many of the more than 4 million people whose individual plans were canceled because they didn’t measure up under the law, as well as hundreds of thousands in federal and state programs for people with serious health problems, from cancer to heart disease to AIDS.