PATHETIC: 51,000 people completed Obamacare apps in 1st week out of millions of Americans

Just 51,000 people completed Obamacare applications during the first week the Healthcare.gov website was online, according to two sources inside the Department of Health and Human Services who gave MailOnline an exclusive look at the earliest enrollment numbers.

The career civil servants, who process data inside the agency, confirmed independently that just 6,200 Americans applied for health insurance through the problem-plagued website on October 1, the day it first opened to the public.

Neither HHS nor the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services would comment on the record about the numbers. Enroll America, the president’s organization of health care ‘navigators’ who are charged with helping Americans sign up, didn’t reply to a request for information about its level of success so far.

The White House also did not respond to emails seeking comment.

But several administration officials have claimed this month that they didn’t have access to the kinds of raw figures MailOnline obtained from the people who work for them. And the anemic totals suggest a far lower level of interest in coverage through the Affordable Care Act than the Obama administration has hoped to see.

Texas Rep. Kevin Brady, a Republican who chairs the House Ways & Means Health Subcommittee, said that ‘if the numbers are accurate,’ they show ‘that relatively few people have navigated the challenges of the first step of the process – roughly the population of a small town in my district.’

‘The White House and HHS have continually claimed they did not have these figures,’ Brady told MailOnline. ‘If they do, they have misled the Congress and the American people.’

The low numbers also reflect a level of technological frustration on the part of Americans whose attempts to investigate their new health insurance options have been met with crashes, error messages and interminable delays.

Read more: dailymail.co.uk