The Obama administration said Wednesday it expects 13.8 million people to enroll in Obamacare health coverage in the upcoming signup season, a target that’s more ambitious than the one officials set last year.
But in a speech noting the Nov. 1 launch of open enrollment and promising the best enrollment numbers yet, Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell also called for Congress to pass a government-funded, “public option” plan with the aim of improving competition in the marketplaces, which have suffered as private insurers have withdrawn under heavy losses.
“The marketplace is a necessary piece of a sensible, market-based solution, and we can’t look backwards in a hopeless search for alternatives that aren’t viable, or just don’t exist,” Burwell said. “What we do have is an opportunity to build on our historic progress.”
“As we’ve said before – to make more substantial changes, like a public option to encourage competition, we’ll need cooperation from Congress,” she continued. “And we are hopeful that soon, we’ll see more bipartisan efforts to make improvements.”
Her call for a public option mirrors a suggestion that the White House has already made as a way to ensure coverage for the millions of people still without health insurance.
Should the administration reach its new Obamacare enrollment goal, that would mean 1.1 million more people will be enrolled in marketplace coverage compared to the end of last enrollment season, when 12.7 million people had signed up. HHS is also estimating an average of 11.4 million people will be actually have paid their premiums and be actively enrolled in coverage in any given month during 2017.
In the first half of this year, an average of 10.4 million people were paying for Obamacare in any given month, according to federal data released Wednesday by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Of the enrollees, 84 percent got subsidies.
That figure means the administration’s goal of having 10 million people pay for coverage by the end of 2016 is in sight. However, that goal is about 3 million below the CBO’s updated estimate for Obamacare enrollment this year.
The CBO initially projected that the marketplaces this year would enroll 21 million people, but reduced that projection to 13 million in January. The agency said at the time that the change was based on information about 2015 Obamacare enrollment and new information about who will purchase insurance.
Burwell has announced a number of new initiatives this year aimed at convincing younger, healthier people to sign up and improve the risk pools, including partnerships with several social media websites and efforts to reach people with more targeted advertising. She said Wednesday she’s “confident” and “excited” about the future of the marketplaces.
“Of course, the biggest opportunity we have to strengthen the marketplace with a bigger, healthier risk pool is right in front of us — this upcoming open enrollment,” she said. “This is the last open enrollment for this administration. We’re going to make it count.”
