Why would she doubt the reliability of the data? Because of the back-end problems on the website. It may be that insurers have so many garbled or incomplete applications piled up that theyre honestly not sure yet how many of them will result in successful enrollments when theyre processed. Even the applications themselves might be duplicative in some cases; they could have five in the stack from the same person, generated by a site glitch, which might at first blush look like five separate applications but in fact really just represents one. No one, except maybe the tech surge team and the insurers themselves, has any sense of how bad it might be. So Sebelius is seizing the opportunity presented by the datas unreliability to say the whole subjects off-limits. Government accountability at work.
Via the Corner, heres Jay Carney earlier today conceding that the number of enrollments will be low because that was always going to be the case. Remember, eight weeks ago, they thought 494,620 qualified as low.