‘Obamacare’ holding its own: 6.4M signed up
It’s unclear if administration will meet its target of 13.8M sign-ups
WASHINGTON—”Obamacare” seems to be holding its own.
The administration said on Wednesday that 6.4 million people have enrolled for subsidized private coverage through HealthCare.gov, ahead of last year’s pace.
Despite rising premiums, dwindling insurers and the Republican vow to repeal President Barack Obama’s health care law, about 400,000 more people signed up through Monday than for a comparable period in 2015, the Health and Human Services Department said.
“Today’s enrollment numbers confirm that doomsday predictions about the marketplace are not bearing out,” said HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell.
Still, it’s too early for supporters of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), to say “I told you so.”
It’s unclear if the administration will meet its target of 13.8 million sign-ups.
That’s partly because the share of new customers is down when compared with current consumers re-upping for another year.
New customers are 32 percent of the total this year versus 40 percent around the same time last year.
Administration officials said they’re going to focus on getting more new customers between now and the end of open enrollment on Jan. 31.
Other vital signs for HealthCare.gov were encouraging.
“There are zero signs that the ACA’s marketplaces are in danger of imminent collapse,” said Larry Levitt of the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, who has followed the health care law from its inception.
That carries an implicit warning for President-elect Donald Trump and congressional Republicans, who have promised to move quickly to repeal the law. That repeal would be followed by a GOPinspired replacement.
Although immediate changes affecting 2017 are unlikely, the whole process could take several years, creating uncertainty for people with coverage.
As if on cue, Democratic governors on Wednesday fired off a letter to GOP congressional leaders, calling the repeal plan “nothing more than a Washington, D.C., bait-and-switch” that would leave millions uninsured and shift to states an estimated $69 billion in uncompensated care costs over a decade.
The statistics released on Wednesday are for 39 states served by the federal online insurance marketplace. Numbers from states running their own markets have not been fully tallied and will be added later, raising the total.
Toward the end of this month, several million current customers who are being reenrolled automatically will be added to the count.
Some of the biggest sign-up numbers so far are coming from states Trump won in the presidential election, including Florida (1.3 million); Texas (776,000); North Carolina (369,000); Georgia (352,000) and Pennsylvania (291,000).
Vice President-elect Mike Pence’s home state of Indiana had 119,000 residents enrolled.
Premiums for a midlevel benchmark plan in HealthCare.gov states are going up an average of 25 percent next year, driven by lower-than-expected enrollment and higher medical costs.
At the same time, about one-third of US counties will have only one marketplace insurer next year because some major commercial carriers have left the market, and many nonprofit insurance co-ops created by the law have collapsed.