(Bloomberg) — A "culture of increased transparency" is needed at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), HHS Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell said. Earlier, she reported that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) enrollment total was padded with dental plan customers in what she has called an error.
The mistake was "unacceptable," Burwell said in a memo obtained by Bloomberg News. She sent the memo to her senior managers yesterday evening. As a first step, she told the managers to convene meetings with staff to solicit suggestions for increasing "transparency, ownership and accountability" at the 77,000-employee agency she runs.
See also: 5 ways small-group exchange plans went wrong.
The number of people signed up for health insurance is a key measure of success for PPACA, which is also known as Obamacare. The health department acknowledged Nov. 20 that it had double-counted about 393,000 people in dental plans when it announced that 7.3 million Americans were enrolled in August. Enrollment was revised downward as a result, to 6.9 million in August and 6.7 million in October.
"One of our most important obligations to the American people is to report information and data accurately," Burwell said in her memo. "We are working quickly to understand what happened and to improve our processes in order to prevent similar mistakes from occurring again."
Republicans have suggested the Obama administration intended to mislead the public by double-counting the dental plans, though so far there isn't any evidence to support that claim. Adding dental plan customers to the overall figure kept PPACA exchange plan enrollment above 7 million, a symbolic threshold the Obama administration adopted as a goal for the program in 2013.
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