After tumult, ACA shows signs of stability this year

Despite glitches, open enrollment underway now through Dec. 15.

Open enrollment this year for the Affordable Care Act, also

known as Obamacare, is underway until Dec. 15. And while Obamacare may be hanging by a thread in the courts, people who sell ACA plans say they’re selling well.

The website had a glitch the first day, stopping business nationwide for several hours. But it was fixed, and people were otherwise signing up at a brisk pace.

“This year I think is going to be a good year for the ACA,” George Kalogeropoulos, the CEO of HealthSherpa.com, said near

the end of the opening day. HealthSherpa.com is a website that taps into the computer data from the federal healthcare. gov sign-up website and presents it in an easier way for people enrolling.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if ACA enrollment goes up this year,” Kalogeropoulos said.

The federal government has numbers, but they don’t tell much of a story yet, since most people tend to wait until the end of the enrollment period to sign up.

Open enrollment on the ACA exchange runs from Nov. 1 to Dec. 15. The plans begin coverage on Jan. 1.

The government releases sign-up totals in weekly snapshots. This year’s first week contained only two days, a Friday and a Saturday. The snapshot said 177,000 signed up nationwide. That’s well under the daily average for Week One of the year before, but it includes the long shutdown on the first day.

On the Obamacare exchange, individual insurance plans must cover “essential health benefits,” such as emergencies, mental health care, maternity care and prescription drugs. They’re also subsidized for people who earn less than four times the poverty level, or an income of $103,000 for a family of four. At the lower-income levels, down to the poverty level, the subsidies can be so significant they can even make a plan free.

People from zero income to the poverty level are not eligible for subsidies. Those people and the upper-income people on the ACA market must pay full price for their plans, a huge cost these days. Many simply don’t buy.

But many do. More than 400,000 Georgians currently have Obamacare plans.

There are reasons the market might do well this year.

Above all, say experts and insurance companies, the market is finally looking stable. For the past year the news hasn’t been dominated by fights about repealing the health care law that make consumers wary. That was such a big issue last year, according to one study, large portions of Americans believed Obamacare had been repealed and that no one could sign up.

Nowhere is this year’s newfound stability so apparent as in Georgia. In this state during the 2018 plan year, insurers cited uncertainty over the political fights as one reason to raise rates as much as 57.7%. This year, rates stayed flat. Some even went down.

Two new insurers also entered the market in Georgia: Oscar Health and CareSource. That means more competition for the companies that were already here: Ambetter, Anthem/ Blue Cross, Centene/Ambetter and Kaiser Permanente, and more options for some Georgians.

U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, in a phone call with reporters, had a different explanation for the market’s stability than the toning down of repeal rhetoric. He said President Donald Trump was apparently better at running the exchange than President Barack Obama.

It’s an open question how long the exchange will continue to exist at all. Conservative state attorneys general, including Georgia’s Chris Carr, have sued to repeal the entire ACA health law, and their suit is getting a serious hearing from federal judges. In addition, Gov. Brian Kemp has proposed a set of “waiver” proposals asking the federal government to allow him to make big changes to the marketplace.