Administration officials boasted Monday that a significant bug on HealthCare.gov’s back-end had been fixed, but then would not say how many people had been affected by the issue.
Julie Bataille, spokeswoman for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, told reporters that one bug involving Social Security numbers was responsible for 80 percent of the errors in data being transmitted to insurers when people submitted their applications through the website. That error — a significant source of concern for insurers — has been fixed, she said.
But when multiple reporters pressed Bataille to quantify what number or what percentage of applications had been transmitted with bad data, she said she could not provide any additional information.
“That is not something I have available,” she said.
The New York Times and Wall Street Journal both reported Sunday that insurers said they were still receiving bad or missing data from HealthCare.gov. They portrayed it as a significant impediment to getting people covered under the law. “Health plans can’t process enrollments they don’t receive,” a spokesman for America’s Health Insurance Plans, the industry’s top lobbying group, told the Times.
Bataille encouraged people who have enrolled in coverage through HealthCare.gov to call their insurer to verify that they’ve been enrolled and/or paid their first premium.
