Obamacare got six enrollees on Day 1: report

Obamacare got six enrollees on Day 1: report

Six.

That's how many people signed up for Obamacare on Day 1, according to CBS News, and no that's not a misprint.

The Obama administration has kept the number of enrollments close to the vest. It's touted the number of visitors to the troubled HealthCare.gov website — 4.7 million — but hasn't released the actual number of enrollments.

But according to CBS News, notes from a "war room" meeting the day after the Affordable Care Act launched on Oct. 1 say "six enrollments have occurred so far." By the end of Day 2, enrollments totaled 248 nationwide.

The White House predicted 500,000 would sign up by the end of the month, according to a memo obtained by The Associated Press, and that was considered a "modest start" for the market.

CBS notes that in order to meet the goal of 7 million enrollments by March 1, the exchanges need to enroll an average of 39,000 a day.

During Wednesday's congressional hearing, Health and Human Services head Kathleen Sebelius was asked several times for the number of enrollments. She explained that the data was unreliable and would not be available until mid-November.

"We do not have any reliable data around enrollment, which is why we haven’t given it to date," she said.

The Obama administration has enlisted the services of computer engineers from tech companies such as Google and Oracle to help fix the troubled health care website, which has been plagued with issues from the start. As Sebelius testified on Wednesday that the site "has never crashed," users trying to access it found a message that read, "The system is down at the moment."