Enrollment in California’s Obamacare exchange is falling slightly behind compared with last year, even though state officials have heavily supported the healthcare law.
As of Nov. 30, enrollment was 1,290,500, a drop of just under 1 percent down from the 1,302,000 customers who signed up for plans around the same time last year.
Democrats in Congress have warned that sign-ups would fall behind in the Obamacare exchange that most of the rest of the country uses, called healthcare.gov. That site is operated by the federal government, and Democrats have accused the Trump administration of trying to sabotage the healthcare law because it has slashed the budget for organizations that help people enroll, cut ads, and reduced the sign-up period from three months to six weeks.
And enrollment there has lagged by a larger percentage than in California, by about 11 percent. During the first 24 days of open enrollment for healthcare.gov, 2,424,913 people signed up for health insurance plans. Around the same time last year, at 25 days into enrollment, 2,781,260 people had signed up for coverage. The federal government is spending roughly $10 million on ads and another $10 million on navigators.
But California has not pursued the same actions as the Trump administration. It is spending $110 million on advertising and outreach, and has kept the sign-up deadline to three months. It also has banned the sale of short-term plans, which are a cheaper alternative for certain customers but contain fewer benefits, and were made more widely available elsewhere under President Trump.
A higher drop, of roughly 16 percent, is being observed in New Jersey, which allocated $825,000 for outreach, funded a program that helped reduce premiums, and re-instituted a penalty that fines people if they go uninsured.
California officials noted in a release that they delayed state marketing of open enrollment until after Election Day, meaning that two weeks of open enrollment had kicked off before that point.
James Scullary, a Covered California spokesman, stressed that enrollment should be compared with 2016 figures instead, because there was an election that year as well and marketing operated similarly. When compared to those numbers, the pace of enrollment for new customers is slightly ahead. In 2016, 80,000 new customers picked plans, compared with 90,500 this year.
The office did not provide total enrollment for 2016 in time for deadline, and the numbers were not recorded in the press release archives.
A release from Covered California theorized that awareness about the law may be a factor for the slowdown, because last year the media extensively covered the debate over “repeal and replace” in Congress.
That year, however, overall enrollment in the California exchange after the final deadline fell by roughly 2.3 percent.
It’s possible in each of these cases that people are choosing to purchase health insurance directly through an insurer instead of on the healthcare.gov website, or that former customers are getting coverage through a job instead. This would mean that the number of uninsured wouldn’t rise, even if the number that sign up through the marketplace goes down.
The numbers in California appear close to where the federal exchange is now because the state tallies auto-renewals, Charles Gaba, a supporter of the healthcare law who runs the site ACASignups.net, said in a Twitter message. On the federal exchange, these renewals are tallied after the Dec. 15 deadline. Just under 9 million are expected to enroll in healthcare.gov by the end of that time.
Unlike the federal exchange, people in California will be able to sign up as late as Jan. 15. In most states the deadline is Dec. 15.
