Obamacare enrollments are growing steadily, but it will be hard to tell whether they’re keeping pace with last year’s signup rate until after next week’s deadline for coverage starting New Year’s Day.
About 2.8 million Americans have selected plans on healthcare.gov since signups began last month, Obama administration officials said Wednesday. About one-third of the consumers were new enrollees, while the rest were renewing coverage after buying it last year.
“We’re not running any victory runs,” said Kevin Counihan, chief executive of the health insurance marketplaces for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. “We got a long way to go still, but the start’s good.”
Five weeks into enrollment last year, many more people — about 6.4 million — had enrolled using the federal health insurance marketplace. But that period included a major surge in signups around Dec. 15, which is the deadline for buying a plan that starts Jan. 1. This year’s enrollment season started 15 days earlier, on Nov. 1, so the surge presumably hasn’t started yet.
Current enrollees who don’t actively select by Dec. 15 will be automatically re-enrolled, further boosting the numbers, officials said.
Healthcare.gov experienced some of its busiest days so far last week, with more than 65,000 people visiting the site at once, said CMS Acting Administrator Andy Slavitt.
“The ramp-up in interest we’re seeing is certainly a good sign,” Slavitt told reporters Wednesday.
To meet its national enrollment goal this year of 10 million people, the administration would have to achieve signups at a slightly faster rate than last year, when it was aiming for 9.1 million enrollees.
The data released Wednesday include enrollees only in the 38 states fully or partially relying on the federal government to run their insurance marketplaces. Twelve other states and the District of Columbia have set up their own marketplaces.
