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MNSure officials say they should know later Tuesday morning how many Minnesotans enrolled in health care plans by last night's deadline.  


"Given the heavy traffic to our call center, and our website over the weekend, up really until 11 o'clock last night, we know those numbers will significantly increase," said Lucinda Jesson, state human services commissioner.


MNSure is also tallying the number of people who tried to sign up before the deadline but couldn't complete their applications, said Jesson, who sits on the MNSure board of directors.


"If people had trouble and made a good-faith effort to get through, we'll make sure they get insurance," she told MPR News' Morning Edition.


The MNSure website was stable, despite the heavy volume of traffic, she said.

 
"But the challenge was, we count on the federal hub to verify individual's identity who may be eligible for financial assistance," Jesson said.  "That federal hub was only intermittently available yesterday. So people had a hard time creating accounts. And those are folks, if they had trouble getting through, we want to reach out and help further."


Jesson said the goal is to help those people get signed up early this month. People that couldn't sign up were told to fill out an 

 -- and spokesman John Schadl said it could take several weeks for MNsure to process all of those.

"We're going to have to get those forms in, get them into a database, and then begin reaching out to those consumers to make sure that their cases are in the system and they can be processed," he said.


Jesson said more than 150,000 people signed up for health insurance through the state's exchange before Monday's deadline.

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MNSure officials say they should know later Tuesday morning how many Minnesotans enrolled in health care plans by last night's deadline.

The deadline for Americans to sign up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act passed at midnight.  In Minnesota, the last day saw about 25,000 calls, more than four times the previous daily record, to the state-run health exchange called MNsure.  It was a rocky few months for the exchange.  But the program has already met its goal of enrolling 135,000 Minnesotans with some kind of health insurance.  MPR's Phil Picardi spoke with Lucinda Jesson.  She sits on the MNsure board of directors, and is Minnesota's Commissioner of Human Services.

MNsure to announce enrollment estimates

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