Administration: Obamacare Paid Enrollment at 7.3 Million People

About 7.3 million people have paid for their Obamacare coverage and remain enrolled in health insurance plans sold through new government-run markets, a top U.S. official said today.

That’s a 9 percent reduction from the government’s 8 million May estimate, which reflected only how many people had signed up, not how many had actually paid and were enrolled in the coverage, a figure long sought by Republican lawmakers who oppose the law.

The announcement, by Marilyn Tavenner, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, is the first time since then that the Obama administration has provided enrollment figures under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Seven million more have signed up through Medicaid, the U.S. health program for the poor

Tavenner released the new figure at a hearing by House Oversight and Government Reform Committee in Washington, where Republicans opposed to the health law plan to pepper her with questions about the security of the government’s insurance website and the destruction of e-mails she wrote before the site opened for business.

“A new wave of evidence shows that the Affordable Care Act is working to make health care coverage more affordable, accessible and of higher quality, for families, seniors, businesses and taxpayer alike,” Tavenner said in a statement prepared for the hearing.

Within Estimates

While 8 million people selected health plans using the federal system and 14 state-run insurance markets, their enrollment wasn’t confirmed until they paid the first month’s premium to their insurer. Insurance companies including Aetna Inc. and WellPoint Inc. have previously said they’ve collected premiums from 80 to 90 percent of their Affordable Care Act customers.

Representative Darrell Issa of California, the chairman of the committee, criticized the site’s security and the Obama administration’s obfuscation of its problems, in opening remarks at the hearing.

“This administration has not complied with, nor caused their key executives including political appointees to comply with, the federal records act,” he said. Addressing Tavenner, he told her, “Your actions hinder Congress’ investigation and also prevent the public from accessing information under the Freedom of Information Act.”

Tavenner said the healthcare.gov site hadn’t had a major data security problem. “To date, there is no evidence that a person or group has maliciously accessed personally identifiable information from the site,” Tavenner said in a prepared statement.