WASHINGTON - Nearly 2.5 million people signed up for health plans using the federal Obamacare marketplace as of Friday, administration officials said Tuesday, offering a generally upbeat account of the initial phase of this year's open enrollment period.
The process was not completely smooth, however. From Saturday through Monday, as the deadline approached for coverage that would be effective Jan. 1, about 500,000 people - nearly one-third of those who called - were unable to get through to call center workers because of heavy volume. They left their names for calls back and are now being contacted, said Andy Slavitt, who oversees the federal government's health care marketplace.
All those who tried to contact the centers by Monday's midnight deadline will be given extended time to enroll, he said.
Those who aren't eligible for the extended deadlines can still enroll during the remainder of the three-month enrollment period, but their coverage will take effect in February or later.
The federal marketplace's website, HealthCare.gov, saw 3 million unique visitors in the days leading up to the deadline. Administration officials don't expect to announce the enrollment totals from that period until next week.
In addition to those who have signed up on the federal marketplace, an undetermined number of people have signed up on marketplaces run by California and other states that use their own websites rather than the federal one. Based on last year's experience, those enrollments could come close to matching the numbers on the federal site. Many of those states have extended their deadlines for enrolling in coverage that will be effective in January.
On top of those, the several million more people who signed up for coverage during Obamacare's first year and checked a box saying they wanted to be eligible for automatic re-enrollment will be signed up over the next couple of weeks.
All that indicates that total enrollment for year two of Obamacare is likely to exceed the estimate of between 9 million and 9.9 million that the administration announced last month. About 7.7 million people enrolled in Obamacare's first year.
Since 2010, when Congress passed the health care law, the percentage of Americans younger than 65 without insurance has dropped by nearly a third, according to the most recent government data. In the summer of 2010, about 19 percent of Americans under 65 were uninsured. By this past summer, the figure had dropped to 12.9 percent, according to the data.