Greg welcomes guests Lori Rothman and Joe DeVito. Plus, TV's Andy Levy joins the panel.
Less than 1% of Web visitors are signing up for ObamaCare on some state health exchange websites
- California's program registered an estimated 0.58 per cent of website visitors in its first day
- A Connecticut congressman boasted that his state took 167 applications for Obamacare services on day one, a rate of 0.59 per cent
- Obama administration won't say how many Americans signed up on the central website that covered insurance exchanges for 36 states
- Kentucky's 5.3 per cent application rate seems to be the nation's highest
- Other states wouldn't provide statistics, or tracked only the creation of new online accounts, not numbers of completed applications
As President Obama's signature health insurance overhaul effort began to enroll new participants on Monday, some states running their own insurance exchanges saw huge levels of website traffic but paltry interest in signing up.
California, the ultimate blue state whose federal lawmakers voted overwhelmingly in support of Obamacare, turned less than 1 per cent of its Web visits into 'Covered California' participants on Tuesday.
'We had over 5.7 million hits to our website as of 3 p.m. yesterday,' Covered California spokeswoman Kelsey Caldwell told MailOnline Wednesday.
'7,700 consumers began their application process yesterday. … 4,143 applications are pending,' she added. 'We received 23,269 calls yesterday to our service center.'
Caldwell couldn't say how many of the 5.7 million website hits were from unique Californians. But assuming 712,500 online visitors saw eight different Web pages each, the sign-up rate was 0.58 per cent.
Connecticut saw a similarly low rate of interest. Democratic Congressman Jim Himes tweeted after 8:30 p.m. Monday that his state's health exchange had 'received 28k visitors, and took 167 applications for health insurance. Day 1.'UPDATE: California: Remember Yesterday When We Said Our Obamacare Exchange Got 5 Million Hits? Yeah, It Was More Like 645,000...
California's health insurance exchange vastly overstated the number of online hits it received Tuesday during the rollout of Obamacare.
State officials said the Covered California website got 645,000 hits during the first day of enrollment, far fewer than the 5 million it reported Tuesday.
The state exchange had cited the 5 million figure as a sign of strong consumer interest and a major reason people had so much difficulty using its $313-million online enrollment system.
Dana Howard, a spokesman for Covered California, said the error was the result of internal miscommunication.
"Someone misspoke and thought it was indeed 5 million hits. That was incorrect," he said.
Howard said the revised Web traffic still represents a huge response. He said the number of unique online visitors Tuesday was 514,000 and the state received 19,000 calls.
Meantime, Californians were still running into computer problems and long hold times during the second day of enrollment under the federal healthcare law.
Those glitches have prompted Covered California to shut down its online enrollment system twice.Mary Katharine Ham has some additional insights:
The more health care decisions are made by the government, the more power we give them to split limited resources between citizens, the more each little faction of Americans with this condition or that condition is going to have to lobby for care. Every single treatment will have a constituency, an online petition, a lobbyist, and will vie with other Americans to scoop up as big a piece as they can from a pie that will not grow to serve the population it’s serving and distribute resources efficiently, as in a free market, but stay the same size and distribute them Washington-style.
California's lie about its first official day of failure in administrating Obamacare is just a preview of what (even more) politicized health care looks like.
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