Health-Insurance Applications Near 700,000

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Nearly 700,000 Americans have completed applications for health insurance using federal and state insurance marketplaces, an Obama administration spokeswoman said Thursday, trying to parry characterizations of the health-law rollout as a failure and a disaster.

Thursday was the first of what the administration says will be daily briefings by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS, the agency in charge of the problem-plagued HealthCare.gov website.

The site serves people living in 36 states. Fourteen states are fully running their own marketplaces and have generally fared better.

Julie Bataille, director of the CMS office of communications, said the 700,000 figure included the state exchanges, but she didn’t offer a breakdown. A Wall Street Journal tally shows at least 325,000 people in those states have started health-insurance applications, and probably more. At least 264,000 have completed applications to have eligibility for subsidies determined in those 14 states and the District of Columbia. [Note: The 325,000 figure represents the number who have started applications, according to the Journal's tally of state reports. An earlier version of this post incorrectly described it as the number who have completed applications.]

The botched rollout came under harsh criticism at a four-and-a-half-hour hearing Thursday at the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The committee’s chairman, Rep. Fred Upton, said the site was “nothing short of a disaster.”

“We know the experience on HealthCare.gov has been frustrating for many Americans …with error messages and timeouts,” said Ms. Bataille.

Contractors at the House hearing said their individual parts of the system worked during testing leading up to the Oct. 1 launch. CMS was in charge of bolting the parts together, and end-to-end testing didn’t happen until the final weeks, the contractors said.

“Obviously due to a compressed time frame the system wasn’t tested enough,” Ms. Bataille said.

Still, she accentuated the positive, saying 1.8 million people have contacted a call center with questions, suggesting high interest among Americans in getting health coverage.

On Tuesday the Obama administration named Jeffrey Zients–slated to become the next director of the National Economic Council in January–as an adviser to help fix HealthCare.gov. The administration also said it was bringing in other experts but declined to name them.