Saying, “We’ve started strong,” the health insurance exchange Covered California announced first-week signups of 16,311 households.
About 28,700 individuals completed eligibility determinations. Another 27,305 households had partially gone through the online application process.
Covered California CEO Peter Lee joked with reporters just before the Oct. 1 launch that maybe two people would sign up in October — a month already consigned to consumer comparison shopping, not buying.
“It’s just the beginning, but these numbers are truly exciting and encouraging,” Lee said as the week 1 numbers for Covered California were announced.
California’s health insurance exchange forecasts as many as 700,000 individuals will sign up for health care coverage and subsidies in its first six-month enrollment period.
Covered California is the Obamacare marketplace in California, for individuals and their families, and small businesses. Medi-Cal signups also are facilitated by the new exchange.
The first week statistics — covering Tuesday through Saturday, Oct. 1-5 — showed almost 60,000 calls logged at service centers with an average wait time of 15 minutes. (The wait time was reduced to roughly four minutes by Friday, the exchange said.)
The Covered California web site attracted about 987,440 unique visitors, a strong number but a far cry from initial reports of 5 million visits on day 1. (Read about the Obamacare web site confusion.)
The New York state Obamacare site reported 40,000 applications completed and evaluated in its first week. In Washington State, the number was 9,400. Connecticut had worked through 1,175 enrollments, the New York Times reported.
Going forward, Covered California will release statistics on a Sunday through Saturday schedule.
“Covered California is committed to sharing information and will continue to report weekly on the numbers of visits to our website and the number of consumer calls to our Service Centers,” Lee said.
About 430 small businesses had registered as of Tuesday.
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