Many more people have selected Obamacare plans that start New Year’s Day compared with last year, President Obama announced Friday.
In a burst of holiday cheer for President Obama’s healthcare law, data released by the administration show that about 75 percent more people have chosen health insurance plans on healthcare.gov this year than at the same point in 2014.
About 6 million people signed up using the federal insurance marketplace by the extended Thursday deadline for getting coverage starting Jan. 1. Just 3.4 million Americans had chosen plans by the same deadline last year.
“The more people who sign up, the stronger the system becomes,” Obama said in a press conference Friday afternoon.
The totals released Friday signal a successful start to the third year of enrollment in health insurance marketplaces set up under the Affordable Care Act. The Obama administration has about six more weeks to reach its enrollment goal of 10 million people.
“The unprecedented demand and the millions of new customers who have signed up for health insurance send a clear message: the marketplaces meet an important need that had gone unanswered for too long,” Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathew Burwell said. “Millions of Americans want and need coverage.”
The 6 million number doesn’t include people already covered by an Obamacare plan who will be automatically enrolled in coverage unless they opt out. It also leaves out enrollment numbers from the dozen or so states running their own marketplaces.
Officials also said there’s good news this year on another important benchmark: the number of people signing up for the first time. Now that it’s the third year of Obamacare enrollment, there’s a wide acknowledgement that getting new enrollees will be harder than in the previous two years, although doing so is crucial to helping the insurance pools work as intended.
At this point last year, a higher percentage of enrollees were first-time customers, about 52 percent. This year, that’s down to 40 percent, but it’s still more people overall, about 2.4 million.
“This demonstrates there is pent-up demand for coverage, and most importantly, we’re refreshing the risk pool,” said Kevin Counihan, chief executive for the marketplace at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Officials said that despite the promising numbers, they’re not upgrading their goal of 10 million enrollees total, a number many perceived as a lowball figure. The Congressional Budget Office had projected enrollment would hit twice that number.
“This information is too fresh and what we’re seeing is too new for us to be able to respond with our thoughts on the projection,” said CMS acting administrator Andy Slavitt. “We’re obviously pleased there is this level of demand for the third enrollment season … but we haven’t begun to think about things like projections yet.”
