Measly Enrollment, Open Source Help and Other HealthCare.gov News

The rocky rollout of HealthCare.gov, the website for people to sign up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, has garnered a lot of attention from the media as well as technology analysts. Here's our daily roundup of some of the key reports you may have missed:

It’s no secret that HealthCare.gov got off to a slow start, but just how slow? On the morning of Oct. 2, one day after launch of the national health insurance marketplace, only six people had successfully enrolled in health care plans through the site. By the next morning, that number jumped to 248.

The information was produced by contractors responding to a request from House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif. Issa also requested information from Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius for HealthCare.gov documents, including enrollment figures, but HHS said it has not had enough time to fulfill the broad request for documents. The HHS request was upgraded to a subpoena this week, with a Nov. 13 due date.

That’s not soon enough for House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp, R-Mich., who threatened his own subpoena of all the government’s enrollment data. “I will not wait until around mid-November for the administration’s scrubbed and spun numbers,” he said in a statement. Federal officials, including Sebelius, have declined to make enrollment data public, saying early numbers would be inaccurate or misleading.

In other news, the open source community has been eager to help fix the troubled site, but it’s unclear if the Obama administration or contractors are taking notice, NBC reports. Developers do seem to fix vulnerabilities brought to their attention by Nextgov and other media outlets.