A paltry 36,000 people managed to enroll in the federal online health-insurance marketplace in its first, software-glitch-ridden week of operation, a grim new analysis found Wednesday.
That's "far fewer than one percent of all visitors to HealthCare.gov" for the week ended Oct. 5, wrote Matt Pace, managing director of research firm Millward Brown Digital, on a blog post entitled "A Bleak First Week."
In fact, the firm found 99.6 percent of HealthCare.gov's visitors left before enrolling in coverage, a sobering statistic given the Obama administration's goal of signing up 7 million people on new government-run health exchanges by 2014.
HealthCare.gov is offering a menu of health insurance plan options to residents of the 36 states that are not operating their own health exchanges. Previously released data from the states running their own exchanges—a number of which are struggling with tech problems of their own—also suggests a very low level of enrollment so far.
"Unfortunately, what started as a fire hose of interest, resulted in only a small trickle of actual health-care enrollments," Pace wrote....
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Full story from CNBC.
