1 Million Applied for Health Insurance in Federal Marketplace in First Week of ...

Washington - Obama administration officials said Wednesday that more than one million people had submitted applications for health insurance and 45 percent of them selected health plans in the first week of this fall's open enrollment period under the Affordable Care Act.

The applications showed that in contrast to initial catastrophic problems last year, HealthCare.gov, the website for the federal insurance marketplace, was working and that a significant number of people had signed up for health care.

'We are off to a solid start,' Sylvia Mathews Burwell, the secretary of health and human services, said in a conference call with reporters. 'But we've got a lot of work to do every day between now and Feb. 15.'

The three-month enrollment period ends on Feb. 15.

Ms. Burwell delivered a progress report on the use of the website, which serves 37 states. The numbers do not include activity in the 13 states that run their own insurance exchanges.

From Nov. 15 to 21, the administration said, 1,032,129 applications were submitted to the federal exchange, and 462,125 people chose plans offered for sale in the federal marketplace.

Of those selecting plans, 48 percent were new to the federal marketplace or had coverage that had been terminated for various reasons, such as a failure to pay premiums. The other 52 percent had coverage this year and signed up for insurance in 2015, with the same insurer or a different one.

People who have marketplace coverage and take no action by Dec. 15 will be automatically enrolled in the same plan or a similar one, effective on Jan. 1. They can make a different selection by Feb. 15.

Ms. Burwell said the new figures showed only the number of people enrolled in medical plans and did not include people signing up for separate dental insurance. Congressional investigators discovered last week that the Obama administration had overstated enrollment in 2014 by including about 400,000 dental insurance policyholders in the total of 7.1 million with health insurance.

'The mistake we made is unacceptable,' the secretary said in a Twitter post last week.

Aaron K. Albright, a spokesman for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said that actual enrollment in the federal and state exchanges as of mid-October was 6.7 million. Despite the change, Ms. Burwell said Wednesday, the administration is maintaining its goal of having 9.1 million people enrolled and paying premiums by the end of 2015.

In the first week of open enrollment this fall, the administration said, the call center for HealthCare.gov received nearly 1.1 million telephone calls and the average waiting time was about three minutes. The government counted 3.7 million users of HealthCare.gov. But officials said that visitors to the site may have been counted more than once if, for example, they used different devices, like a laptop computer and a cellphone.

Nearly one-fourth of Hispanics are uninsured, according to the Census Bureau, but the administration reported that only 96,000 people visited the Spanish-language version of HealthCare.gov in the first week, and the call center received only 102,000 calls from people who chose to talk to a Spanish-speaking customer service representative.

Kevin J. Counihan, the chief executive of the federal insurance marketplace, said the administration would work with three organizations to help consumers understand how they can sign up for coverage under the health care law. He identified the groups as Westfield shopping centers, the National Community Pharmacists Association and the XO Group, a media company that caters to women who are engaged, newly married or pregnant.