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Insurance enrollment figures padded

400,000 people had just stand-alone dental coverage

The Columbian
Published: November 21, 2014, 12:00am

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration recently inflated Affordable Care Act enrollment statistics by as many as 400,000 people by including stand-alone dental plans in their official count, according to an Oversight House committee investigation.

The administration in September said 7.3 million people at the time were enrolled in health plans through the Affordable Care Act insurance marketplaces. The House investigation, first reported by Bloomberg, found that this number also counted people enrolled in just dental coverage, a change from how previous enrollment figures have been counted that the Obama administration did not disclose. Without counting those dental plans, enrollment would have been 6.97 million.

That 7.3 million figure reported by the Department of Health and Human Services was down from the 8 million people who had signed up through the end of April. HHS hasn’t provided a comprehensive accounting of why enrollment fell — such as how many people didn’t pay their premiums or whether those enrollees found another source of coverage.

On Thursday, after news of the House investigation broke, the administration said that its total was “erroneously counted” in recent announcements.

HHS said it made this mistake twice. The agency overstated its September figures by about 400,000. Then in November, it reported an inaccurate figure again when it said 7.1 million people were enrolled at the time; the actual figure was 6.7 million.

Despite these corrected figures, HHS said it still aims to have 9.1 million covered in marketplace plans next year — which is about 4 million people fewer than the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office had projected for 2015.

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