WASHINGTON -- Sign-ups under President Barack Obama's health care law surged last week, driven by a deadline for getting covered by Jan. 1, officials said Tuesday. Unlike last year, the healthcare.gov website was working well.
More than 1 million people picked plans from Dec. 6 through Friday, bringing the total to nearly 2.5 million, said Department of Health and Human Services officials.
"It's been a strong start," said Andy Slavitt, the principal deputy administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, who is overseeing the second-year rollout. "Our call center and our technology have done their jobs -- so far."
Tuesday's numbers were partial, reflecting only the 37 states served by the federal healthcare.gov website. Enrollment for states running their own websites will be reported later. Tuesday's numbers also did not include totals from the weekend and Monday.
Charles Gaba, a Michigan-based blogger who has accurately predicted enrollment under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, estimated in a post on his website that about 4.7 million people nationwide had signed up for coverage by Monday. That includes federal and state enrollments.
Separately, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a report this week that the uninsured rate among Americans age 18 to 64 had fallen more than 3 percentage points from 2013 through June to 17 percent. About 2.4 percent of Americans younger than 65 were enrolled in plans bought through Affordable Care Act insurance exchanges, the CDC said, on the basis of a survey of about 57,000 people.
Of people who have enrolled so far this year using healthcare.gov, 52 percent already had coverage under the health care law, and 48 percent were new customers.
The administration has set an overall goal of 9.1 million people to be signed up for 2015. That includes new customers plus roughly 6.7 million former customers, most of whom will be renewed automatically, officials have said.
Avalere Health, a private market analysis firm, estimated Tuesday that enrollment will total 10.5 million people by the end of 2015. That's still lower than the 13 million that congressional budget analysts have projected.
Obama's law offers subsidized private insurance to people who don't have access to coverage through their jobs. Monday was the deadline for most people to pick a new plan, or switch existing coverage, in time for the plans to start Jan. 1.
The federal call center experienced long telephone hold times this weekend under the deadline crunch. About 500,000 people left their phone numbers for callbacks. Healthcare.gov had to deploy its online waiting room for some customers Monday, but it had no major problems. Last year, the website was prone to crashing.
"If we put last year and this year together, they have done an amazing job at ramping up their systems," said Mehdi Daoudi, chief executive officer of Catchpoint Systems, which monitors website performance. "The fact is they have been able to adapt."
Catchpoint analyzed healthcare.gov's performance from Nov. 26 through midnight Monday at the request of The Associated Press. The study was conducted with a mix of computers, using a cross-section of Internet providers, at locations around the country.
It found that healthcare.gov's overall availability and user response time were good and that the website improved notably in some areas.
For example, logging in and logging out is much faster. Last year the median time for logging in was 18.46 seconds. For logging out, it was 4.61 seconds. This year the median login time was 3.21 seconds, and 1.91 seconds to log out. The log-in page was available more than 95 percent of the time this year, compared with 84 percent last year.
The next big logistical challenge is making sure that millions of current customers will have a smooth transition to 2015. Existing coverage is supposed to renew seamlessly, but it's the first time the government has attempted the transition.
There's special concern over several hundred thousand people whose current plans will not be offered next year. The government says it will automatically reassign them to similar coverage.
The health insurance industry announced Tuesday that it will help smooth the transition.
The trade group America's Health Insurance Plans said insurers will give customers more time to pay their premiums for January and will promptly refund any overpayments by consumers who switched plans and may have gotten double-billed by mistake.
Insurers also plan to help customers who have problems filling prescriptions or getting medical care at the start of the year.
Last year's enrollment files were riddled with errors, and fixing those has been a painstaking process. As a result, renewing millions of current customers is not as easy as it might seem.
The industry "wants to do everything we can to make sure consumers have greater peace of mind about their health care coverage and support them throughout the open enrollment process," Karen Ignagni, head of the trade group, said in a statement.
Normally, premiums for January would be due by Dec. 31. The industry's grace period for 2015 could vary among different carriers, so consumers should check with their plans, the group said.
Open enrollment actually runs for another two months, until Feb. 15. People enrolling by that date will get coverage starting March 1. Current customers can still make plan changes through Feb. 15.
Information for this article was contributed by Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar of The Associated Press and by Alex Wayne of Bloomberg News.
A Section on 12/17/2014