The Daily Mail is reporting on an exclusive interview with two unnamed sources inside the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) who say only a fraction of people actually enrolled in the program this week.
The sources, who are both career civil servants who process date inside the agency, told the Mail that just 6,200 Americans applied for health care on its opening day, and a mere 51,000 since then.
Thus far, Administration officials have been tight-lipped about the numbers, with HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius telling the Daily Show's Jon Stewart that she couldn't tell him the numbers "because I don't know."
Texas Rep. Kevin Brady, a Republican who chairs the House Ways & Means Health Subcommittee, told the Mail that "if the numbers are accurate," they show "that relatively few people have navigated the challenges of the first step of the process – roughly the population of a small town in my district."
He added: "The White House and HHS have continually claimed they did not have these figures. If they do, they have misled the Congress and the American people."
Open enrollment for ObamaCare will last six months with the Healthcare.gov website providing enrollment services for Americans in 36 states. The remaining 14 states and the District of Columbia are operating their own exchanges.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reports that seven million people need to enroll to prevent the program from financial collapse. Unless there is a dramatic improvement in the number of enrollees, the current rate of enrollment will only net two million people in the program by March 1.
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