On Thursday afternoon — four days before the March 31 deadline — the White House announced that over 6 million people have gotten heath insurance through Obamacare’s federal and state exchanges. Obviously, that’s fewer than the Congressional Budget Office’s initial, Obama-administration-approved estimate of 7 million sign-ups, which was released before the glitchy launch of Healthcare.gov and changed to 6 million once it became clear that the website’s problems were bad enough to keep most users from participating in the program.
During a conference call with supporters, President Obama noted that the figure is expected to rise as the United States’ procrastinators finally get it together to enroll before the end of the month: According to the president, Wednesday saw 1.5 million visits to Healthcare.gov, as well as more than 430,000 calls to call centers by people still unwilling to deal with the website. He also said that they were experiencing a surge. Not bad, especially when you remember how awful the situation looked last fall.
