A leading Republican grilled the top Obamacare official Wednesday afternoon on why enrollment has fallen short of nonpartisan projections.
Rep. Kevin Brady, chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, asked Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell to explain why just 12.7 million Americans have enrolled in the Obamacare marketplaces, a number significantly lower than several projections by the Congressional Budget Office.
“Poor enrollment results show Americans just aren’t buying what the president is selling on this law,” Brady said. “Do you believe CBO’s projections … are fundamentally flawed? Is CBO wrong?”
Burwell acknowledged that enrollment numbers her agency announced last week do fall short of the CBO’s most recent projection of about 13 million enrollees in 2016. In March 2015, CBO had projected enrollment of 21 million this year. But she partially attributed the difference to assumptions by the budget office that more people would drop their employer-sponsored coverage and buy a marketplace plan, which didn’t pan out.
“One of the big changes from CBO’s original estimates is there would be great movement from the employer-based market to the marketplace,” Burwell responded. “And that we have not seen.”
Burwell was on Capitol Hill to testify about Obama’s 2017 budget proposal, which the White House released on Tuesday. But lawmakers indicated early in the hearing that they were more interested in peppering her with questions about the president’s 2010 healthcare law, which remains a politically controversial measure.
A group of House Republicans are working on a proposal to replace the Affordable Care Act, which they are aiming to finish around July. Democrats pushed back at the GOP criticisms at Wednesday’s hearing, with the top Democrat, Rep. Sander Levin of Michigan, accusing his colleagues of pushing their agenda to repeal the law.
“You’ll hear a lot of that ideology today … but I think the realities are so different from that ideology,” Levin said.
