This month, the Get Covered Illinois campaign issued a reportabout first-year enrollment, which ran between last fall and the spring. However, a policy group says the report is misleading. State officials say the roll-out successfully extended health coverage to more than half-a-million people through the exchange and expanded Medicaid.
When you break it down, the campaign says more than 217,000 people enrolled in private insurance through Illinois’ federally operated exchange by the March 31st deadline.
The total exceeded the federal government’s enrollment target for Illinois.
However, the report does not note how many uninsured people were among those who got coverage.
And the right-leaning Illinois Policy Institute estimates the state fell short of its goals to get at least half of the state's 1.3 million uninsured people covered.
A spokesman for the state disputes what the institute is saying. He says the Quinn administration had no specific numerical goals for covering the uninsured.
Meanwhile, the second round of enrollment is scheduled to begin in mid-November.