WASHINGTON — More than 330,000 people have managed to get deep enough into new government health insurance websites to learn how much financial assistance they will receive purchasing coverage, the Internal Revenue Service said Saturday.
That figure is arguably the most robust measure released to date by the Obama administration of how many Americans are successfully applying for financial help in purchasing a private insurance plan.
Calculation of financial assistance is a step that follows filing an application and tells applicants how much of a tax credit — if any — they can use to purchase a private health plan. This figure does not include shoppers who were found to likely qualify for Medicaid earlier in the shopping process.
It also does not measure enrollment in health-law programs. The White House has said it will not release that information until next month.
The IRS said it has also received and responded to more than 1.3 million requests from the marketplace for personal data used to apply for Affordable Care Act programs, such as household income and family size.
The IRS said it is currently receiving about 80,000 such data requests each day. It is one of about a half-dozen agencies that send information to a federal data hub, along with the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration.
“Our IT systems are working well and providing both the historical tax data and the computation service accurately and quickly through the government’s data hub,” IRS spokesman Terry Lemons said.
“The requests are being processed within seconds.”
This federal data hub determines eligibility for premium tax credits for the 36 states using the federal insurance marketplace and also for some, but not all, of the state-based exchanges.
California, for example, opted to use its own technology to determine who qualifies for which programs.
