As Republicans plot repeal, feds report jump in Obamacare signups

Americans’ anxiety about how a new Republican-controlled Congress and President-elect Donald Trump will repeal and replace the health law is helping fuel early enrollment gains in the online marketplaces that sell individual coverage, state exchange officials and health consultants said.

From Nov. 1 through the extended deadline of December 19, 6.4 million consumers signed up for plans through Healthcare.gov, an increase of 400,000 plan selections compared with the same time previous year, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services announced Wednesday.

“Today’s enrollment numbers confirm that some of the doomsday predictions about the marketplace are not bearing out”, said Health Secretary Sylvia Burwell.

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Melanie Hall, who oversees a navigator program called Covering Tampa Bay, said her team was busier in November than any other month since Obamacare became law.

In Florida, 80 percent of enrollees can find coverage for less than $75 a month, officials have said. That’s about 400,00 more than a year ago. “There clearly is a disconnect between people benefiting from this particular program and their political perception about which candidates they want to support”. This year’s total includes 490,425 sign-ups from the Miami-Fort Lauderdale market and 140,446 from West Palm Beach-Fort Pierce. California’s enrollment is about same as a year ago.

This year’s enrollment comes with obstacles.

Access Health CT noted that almost 12,000 people who are now enrolled are in plans that will not exist next year and are therefore not covered.

Despite the rising number of people opting for coverage through the ACA, new customers still only account for 32-percent of those covered through Obamacare compared to 40-percent of new customers that had signed up around the holidays in 2015.

Burwell stressed during a conference call with members of the media Wednesday that enrollments for 2017 plans would continue through the January 30 deadline.

Shortly before Election Day, the administration revealed that premiums for a midlevel benchmark plan on HealthCare.gov would jump by an average of 25 percent next year.

Uncertainty over the future of the health care law and what would replace it is partly fueling more people to sign up despite unrelenting criticism from conservatives. In fact, it represents the biggest increase of people enrolling of any state in the country, according to the Utah Health Policy Project.

Excluded from enrollment figures released Wednesday by HHS were those customers who did not choose a new insurance plan and were automatically re-enrolled in an existing policy. What’s even more surprising? A decision by Humana and UnitedHealthCare to exit the Alabama exchange leaves only Blue Cross Blue Shield as the only provider.

As if on cue, Democratic governors 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 over a decade in uncompensated care costs. “We obviously will do anything asked of us to help the new team”.

Yet the subsidies that people receive to afford the exchange coverage also have trended upward, shielding many from those premium hikes, said Bill Custer, a health insurance expert at Georgia State University. A number of insurers decided not to participate next year, and prices for coverage generally increased.