More than half of people that used the Obamacare health insurance exchange last year do not plan to return to the online marketplace in 2014, a new survey finds.
According to the latest Bankrate Health Insurance Pulse survey, people that experienced the extremely rocky roll out of Healthcare.gov are nervous about going through that experience again, especially due to the high likelihood of price increases and technical glitches.
“We’re now so used to the ease of shopping online that when it doesn’t work, we get really annoyed. And not only did the exchanges not work, they didn’t work on steroids,” Doug Hough, associate director of the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, told Bankrate. “Which wasn’t really surprising. Ask (Amazon.com founder) Jeff Bezos what it would have been like if Amazon had gone from zero to millions of customers in one day.”
All of the survey respondents used the exchanges during the initial open enrollment last fall and winter and 52 percent of them reported having a positive experience.
But still 51 percent of the exchange veterans do not plan to return when the exchange reopens this year on Nov. 15.
The non-return rate breaks down in a variety of different ways.
When broken down by income, 53 percent of those earning less than $30,000 say they plan to give the exchanges another try, while just 35 percent of respondents making $75,000 a year or more plan to try again.
About 66 percent of Republican respondents said they wouldn’t return to the Obamacare exchange and 41 percent of Democrats said the same. An additional 55 percent of independents do not plan to return to the exchange.
There is also a discrepancy between full-time and part-time workers. About 52 percent of respondents who work part time say they plan to shop in the exchanges again, compared with 39 percent of full-timers.
Part-time workers are also more confident in how Healthcare.gov will fare this go around. About 62 percent of respondents who work part time are feeling very or somewhat confident about how the exchanges will perform, compared with 47 percent of full-time workers.
But what are the options for these people beyond the exchanges?
“Going without insurance is far more risky than trying to make the exchange work. My guess is they don’t qualify for a subsidy and therefore are going to shop for coverage outside the exchange,” Gerald Kominski, director of the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, told Bankrate. “That’s a reasonable alternative because the law regulates those so-called ‘mirror’ policies to where there aren’t significant differences. But I don’t think there are any huge bargains there.”
They could also have switched jobs or family status in that time putting them in a completely different circumstance.
Hough believes that most of these people simply do not want to deal with the hassle of the exchange and will let their policy auto-renew.
“They’re going to be auto-renewed,” he says. “With 43 percent saying their experience last time was somewhat or very bad, they’re not looking forward to doing it again. That in itself will encourage people to just go with auto-renew. I predict we’ll see lots and lots and lots of auto-renewals.”
