Obamacare signups were inflated with 380,000 dental subscribers, falsely jacking up the total number of enrollees above 7 million
— and prompting a hasty apology and recalculation Thursday, Bloomberg news reports.
The real number of signups for healthcare plans is 6.7 million as of Oct. 15, the Department of Health and Human Services told the news service.
"The mistake we made is unacceptable," Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell tweeted, Bloomberg reports. "I will be communicating that clearly throughout the department."
The juiced-up total was first noticed by Republican investigators for the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, using data they obtained from the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Bloomberg reports.
Thursday's re-calculation drew a bitter reply from House chairman Darrell Issa.
"After touting 8 million initial sign-ups for medical plans, four months later they engaged in a concerted effort to obscure a heavy drop-out rate of perhaps a million or more enrollees by quietly adding in dental plan signups to exchange numbers," the California Republican lawmaker said in an email to Bloomberg.
HHS spokesman Kevin Griffis told Bloomberg the "mistake" was made because "individuals who had both marketplace medical and dental coverage were erroneously counted in our recent announcements."
The deflated count puts enrollment short of a 2013 estimate by the Congressional Budget Office
— a 7 million mark the Obama administration had set as a goal last year for 2014 enrollments.
And last September,
the administration had boasted of 7.3 million enrollees
— failing to distinguish between medical and dental plans.
That failure, Bloomberg news reports, was a break in usual practice that came without notice.
"Moving forward only individuals with medical coverage will be included in our effectuated enrollment numbers," Griffis vowed.
The numbers from the blended plans also partly hid the attrition of more than 1 million enrollees in medical insurance, Bloomberg reports.
Last May,
the government touted enrollments of 8 million for health plans and that 1.1 million were in dental coverage.
In September, the numbers changed and were fuzzier, Bloomberg reports, noting Medicare agency’s administrator, Marilyn Tavenner, told the House Oversight committee new numbers from insurance companies participating in the exchanges showed that 7.3 million people were "enrolled in the health insurance marketplace coverage," but she didn't elaborate or break out dental plans.
The juiced-up numbers are another smear on the credibility of the Obama administration, according to Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum that has opposed Obamacare.
"The No. 1 most effective message against the Affordable Care Act is: they lied to you to get it through," Holtz-Eakin told Bloomberg, referring to
remarks by Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber that suggested Democrats deceived the public when the law was passed in 2010.
"People believe that years now after its passage. The distrust is already there, and they’re doing nothing but exacerbate it."
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