HHS touts visits to ObamaCare site, but mum on enrollment

ObamaCare’s enrollment portal garnered 14.6 million unique visits in its first 10 days, the Health and Human Services (HHS) Department said Friday.

HHS touted improvements to the troubled site and said that fixes over the last two weeks have substantially reduced wait times and allowed more users to shop for coverage.

The department did not release the number of people who have actually enrolled in the marketplaces despite requests from reporters. The White House has said those figures will be released monthly. 

{mosads}”We know that buying insurance is a thoughtful decision and many consumers are taking their time to consider their options before making a decision,” HHS spokeswoman Joanne Peters said in a statement. 

“We have more than 170 days left to go and people have until December 15 to apply for coverage starting January 1, 2014.”

Healthcare.gov’s rocky rollout has raised questions about whether HHS can fix the site quickly enough to regain users’ confidence in the system.

The Obama administration is hoping to enroll millions of people in the new marketplaces over the next six months, but many users have been thwarted by errors with the online portal.

HHS took the site offline a handful of times in the last week in order to strengthen it.

The department also introduced new features — including a tool to estimate health plan prices without a user account — that allow users to avoid the most knotty parts of the system.

Republicans have criticized the rollout as a disaster and a sign that the healthcare law is unworkable.

Those charges came to a head Friday as Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus and a GOP senator called for the resignation of HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. 

“Hundreds of millions of [dollars] for website that doesn’t work. When will Sebelius be fired for ObamaCare trainwreck?” Priebus tweeted Friday