Guess How Many People Oregon Has Enrolled in Obamacare Through Its Exchange Website – No, Less Than That

Though officials in Oregon claim they are making progress with the glitch-ridden state health insurance exchange website, they also admit that they have yet to enroll a single person on the web.

Officials with "Cover Oregon" said earlier this month that they hope to start enrolling people by Halloween with the help of insurance agents and "certified application assisters," the Oregonian reports.

Cover Oregon

"We're not going to rush out a system that we are not satisfied with," spokesman Michael Cox said.

Just like Healthcare.gov, CoverOregon.com was supposed to allow individuals to enroll themselves in the exchanges starting on Oct. 1. However, officials had to change the plan to allow only insurance agents and application assisters to enroll people through the website. Then officials postponed that plan too when things didn't go smoothly.

Now, Cover Oregon officials are hoping to at least fix the issue preventing agents from enrolling clients by the end of October.

The Oregonian also has some eye-opening statistics on the program:

-As of Wednesday, Cover Oregon has processed 34 paper applications to determine if people were eligible for financial assistance. These applications were not processed by the website, but by hand starting Oct. 15.

-Six applicants qualified for tax credits to bring down the cost of premiums. The remaining 28 applications appear to be eligible for the Medicaid-funded Oregon Health Plan.

- So far, 4,260 paper applications to determine eligibility for assistance have been received. Also, agents and application assisters have created 2,459 electronic customer accounts so they can check eligibility for financial assistance once problems with the website are fixed. That's a total of 6,719 applications. Since some represent families, the applications represented approximately 11,500 Oregonians, officials said.

- The exchange continues to attract strong interest with number of visits topping 470,000. As of last week, each unique visitor visited 1.5 times, suggesting the current number of unique visitors is roughly 300,000.

The system may not work at all, but Cover Oregon has put together plenty of interesting advertisments:

(H/T: Weasel Zippers)

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