The press is asking the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services why they gave out interim exchange activity numbers last week.
Since the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act exchange open enrollment period began Oct. 1, HHS officials have repeatedly refused to give reporters or others detailed interim exchange application or enrollment data.
HHS officials have insisted that the department will release activity numbers once a month, and only once a month, after they have checked data from the HHS-run and state-based exchanges for completeness and accuracy.
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But last week HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced that 3 million people enrolled in private insurance under the law as of mid-January.
A reporter asked at a White House press briefing why Sebelius had released "good news data" several weeks before the release data of the next monthly exchange activity report.
"So, is there going to be more frequent updating?" a reporter asked, according to a briefing transcript. "Is there a change in the policy?"
White House Press Secretary Jay Carney referred questions about the data to HHS.
"What I can tell you is that the approach we've taken as an administration has been to make sure that the data we release is clear and not duplicative, and scrubbed and vetted," Carney said. "And that process has become more efficient as the whole system has become more efficient."
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Allison Bell
Allison Bell, a senior reporter at ThinkAdvisor and BenefitsPRO, previously was an associate editor at National Underwriter Life & Health. She has a bachelor's degree in economics from Washington University in St. Louis and a master's degree in journalism from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. She can be reached through X at @Think_Allison.
