The Obama administration's much touted first-round enrollment figure of 7.3 million reportedly includes about 400,000 people who have only purchased dental plans, the House Oversight Committee has found. The administration's move might have been aiming at hitting congressional budget estimates for the contentious law.
Without the half-million people enrolled in dental-only plans, Republicans on the committee calculated the total enrollment for Obamacare to be 6.98 million, according to an investigation first reported by Bloomberg News.
"Instead of offering the public an accurate accounting, the administration engaged in an effort to obscure and downplay the number of dropouts," Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chairman of the committee, wrote in a statement to Bloomberg.
Crafted in 2009, "the Affordable Care Act actually refers to two separate pieces of legislation - the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (P.L. 111-148) and the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 (P.L. 111-152) - that, together expand Medicaid coverage to millions of low-income Americans and makes numerous improvements to both Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP)," according to Medicaid.gov.
In the first year of enrollment, the Congressional Budget Office had estimated that 7 million people would sign up for health plans on the exchange. But when it was announced by the head of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services that 7.3 million people were paying for the coverage in September, the figure was largely seen as good news.
And even though the new figure might have dropped to 6.97 million, it still remains significantly higher than the Affordable Care Act's strongest detractors predicted, The Hill reported.
The discovery was made after the Oversight Committee requested a breakdown of the data and learned that the agency had included dental plans, though the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) had previously reported dental plans separately.
In a May report, the HHS wrote that "to the extent possible, duplication associated with standalone dental plan selection has been removed from the data shown in this table."
Then last spring, although the White House touted 8 million sign-ups on the health exchanges, the enrollment figures have strayed with some opting not to pay and some being dropped from their private health plans, according to The Washington Times.
"A mistake was made in calculating the number of individuals with effectuated Marketplace enrollments. We have determined that individuals who had both Marketplace medical and dental coverage were erroneously counted in our recent announcements," said HHS spokesman Ben Wakana.
"The correct number of individuals with effectuated Marketplace medical coverage as of October 15 is approximately 6.7 million. Our target for 2015 open enrollment remains 9.1 million individuals. Moving forward only individuals with medical coverage will be included in our effectuated enrollment numbers."
With Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber recently coming under fire for making controversial comments about how lack of transparency and the stupidity of voters helped pass the health care law, revelations about the dental plans are bound to raise more questions about transparency in the health care law.
