California’s Obamacare network failed to register even one person for insurance on when the exchanges opened on Tuesday, according to a local TV station.
Covered California initially claimed 5 million visitors on the first day, but that turned out to be a web-page count of clicks by 500,000 visitors.
“There was about half a million people that visited the website,” said Lizelda Lopez, a spokeswoman for Covered California.
But of that 500,000 visitors, only about 7,100 people submitted applications, said the KUSI-CA anchor.
“Nobody is actually enrolled yet, because the people behind the scenes are not trained,” he said.
California is expected to provide a large proportion of Obamcare network’s customers, partly because 20 percent of state residents and 30 percent of immigrants fall below the poverty level, according to a new report.
“Immigrant poverty, at nearly 30 percent, is remarkably high,” and is pushed to roughly 50 percent above the official level thanks to high property prices, says a new report by a California group, the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality.
The TV clip was tweeted out by the GOP’s National Republican Conference Committee, which is trying to highlight Obamacare’s rollout problems.
Those problems include a dismal first day of enrollment — only 167 applicants were insured in Connecticut, and New York only registered 0.32 percent of visitors, according to the NRCC statement.
“ObamaCare is raising health care costs for Americans and stretching bureaucratic red tape around them and their doctor, while reducing access and limiting choices — it’s no wonder Americans looked at ObamaCare on its first day and said, ‘no thanks,’” the NRCC said in a statement.