The Trump administration is rolling out several new features to Obamacare’s shopping experience on healthcare.gov this year, even as critics continue to accuse officials of trying to sabotage the law because of the way it has cut back on certain advertising and outreach efforts.
Beginning Wednesday morning, customers who buy Obamacare plans can “window shop” on healthcare.gov, meaning they can see what plans will be available to them and how much they will cost. The formal open enrollment season for customers to buy plans is Nov. 1, and individuals making less than $48,240 or $98,400 for a family of four will receive subsidies from the federal government to help pay for premiums.
The Department of Health and Human Services has not set up a target for the number of people it expects to enroll in Obamacare plans, as the Obama administration did in the past.
” Our target this year is to have a seamless open enrollment for consumers,” said Randy Pate, deputy administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. “That’s what we are focused on. The numbers we think will take care of themselves .”
Customers who are in an Obamacare plan this year will be re-enrolled into the same plan or a similar plan if they don’t pick another one by Dec. 15, the deadline to shop for coverage. Senior officials at the Department of Health and Human Services said they would receive “several notices” reminding them to shop.
A call center to help customers with questions they have about plans, or with help for enrollment, will operate like it has in the past, with the same number of staff.
Changes to the way people shop will also be implemented. For instance, customers who are applying for coverage from partner websites, such as ehealthinsurance.org, can make their purchase from that website rather than being redirected to healthcare.gov.
Healthcare.gov itself will also make agents and brokers available to help customers buy plans, rather than relying on navigators, whose budget they cut. Customers will be able to set times they are available so that agents and brokers can call them to help them enroll.
“HHS is implementing open enrollment according to the law,” a senior health official said. “We are making people aware of how and where to sign up.”
Critics, including Democrats, have said that the Trump administration is trying to “sabotage” Obamacare through changes it has made to Obamacare’s open enrollment. The administration cut the timeline for open enrollment in half, to six weeks, and reduced spending on advertising and navigators who help people sign up for coverage. Senior officials said they no longer planned to make visits to states to participate in promotional events, and had scheduled times throughout open enrollment for the site to go down for scheduled maintenance.
Officials pushed back on the claims in a call with the Washington Examiner.
” None of those decisions were made because we were trying to sabotage Obamacare but because we decided they were the best policy decisions,” a senior health official said.
According to the administration, members of the navigator program in 2016 received $62.5 million in federal grants to sign up just 81,426 people, which is about 0.7 percent of total enrollees. Officials said they believe the brokers and agents would be more effective at helping people enroll in coverage.
In an email following the call, Matt Lloyd, spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, wrote, “It’s important to remember that Obamacare enrollment was in decline before President Trump took office. The previous administration inflicted heavy damage on the individual market – premiums doubled, insurers dropped out of the individual market in droves, millions of Americans saw their plans cancelled because Washington didn’t approve of them, and millions more paid billions in fines to avoid the kind of coverage Obamacare dictated. That’s not evidence of a healthy, competitive market nor one that is best serving individuals and families.”
Customers shopping on healthcare.gov this year have fewer options for buying coverage. Many insurers have fled the exchanges, citing losses from selling these plans and also saying that too much uncertainty is ahead.
Payments that insurers have received in the past, called cost-sharing reduction subsidies, were ended by Trump, and though Congress is working on a solution to fund them lawmakers have not come to an agreement. Without them, low-income people still receive subsidies, but costs are shifted onto the federal government and onto customers who do not receive subsidies, who pay for full increases.
According to the Department of Health and Human Services, 53 percent of counties will have one insurer to choose coverage from. Because many of these counties are in rural areas with a lower population, 30 percent of Obamacare customers will be affected.
“More than half the counties in the country have only one carrier and therefore folks in those counties have no choices on Obamacare’s individual market,” Lloyd said.
