From the much anticipated launch on Oct. 1 to Nov. 2, a total of 106,185 Americans selected private health plans in Affordable Care Act insurance exchanges, the Department of Health and Human Services estimates.
"We've every reason to expect more people to enroll," HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a conference call. At the same time, she added, "It's not where we want to be on the 30th of November."
Almost a quarter of those 106,000 enrollments, about 26,700, were by consumers in the 36 states where HHS is running the federal marketplace, the struggling Healthcare.gov, and the rest were through state-based exchanges, which have varied in their functionality success.
There have been many more completed applications for qualified health plans (more than 846,000 in total) and consumers deemed eligible who haven't completed every application step or selected a plan, 975,407 in total and 675,000 from the 36 states shopping on Healthcare.gov.
Another 396,261 Americans who applied in the first month are eligible for Medicaid or the Children's Health Insurance Program, just over half of them applying through state-based exchanges.
For the first month, according to HHS, those numbers are roughly consistent with "past experiences in health insurance enrollment patterns" in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, Medicare Part D, Massachusetts' Commonwealth Care, the Children's Health Insurance Program and the Pre-existing Condition Insurance Plan.
The total number of Americans who've selected a QHP through Nov. 2, about 106,000, is approximately one-fifth of what the Congressional Budget Office expected for the first month of enrollment, on the way to a projected enrollment of 7 million nationwide for the 2014 plan year. There are still five more months of open enrollment, however, Sebelius noted.
The state marketplace websites and Healthcare.gov have attracted fairly high volumes of visitors, with 26.8 million vistors in total -- about 8 percent of the U.S. population -- and the state and federal call centers have received 3.1 million inquries, both of which HHS take as an indcition of "considerable interest" among Americans, "even with the issues we've had," as Sebelius said.
Sebelius highlighted one interested person she met on a get-out-the-enrollment visit to Austin, Texas: 24-year-old Kat Richards, who'll be paying about $70 a month for an exchange health plan after subsidies and contributions from her employer, a small print shop.
HHS is not yet releasing, or may not yet have, enrollment data showing the demographics of enrollment -- data that might hint at the exchanges' risk pool sustainability in the longterm.
"We intend to put out more detailed information" in subsequent release, Sebelius said.