Enrollment in Obamacare plans for 2019 is lagging last year’s pace, which supporters of the law have attributed to a drop off in advertising and other efforts by the Trump administration to “sabotage” the law. But what if there’s a much simpler explanation? What if those who aren’t enrolling this year are people who simply don’t want Obamacare?
Specifically, the most recent numbers available show that during the first 24 days of open enrollment, 2,424,913 people signed up for health insurance plans on the federal healthcare.gov website, compared with the 2,781,260 people who had signed up for coverage 25 days into enrollment a year ago.
With millions of returning customers expected to be “auto-enrolled,” the number is expected to shoot up in the coming weeks. A year ago, about six million were added in the closing two weeks, bringing the total sign-ups to 8.7 million.
Andy Slavitt, who helped oversee Obamacare under Obama as administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, tweeted, “ACA enrollment down 10% so far with Trump marketing budget down 90%.”
BREAKING: ACA enrollment down 10% so far with Trump marketing budget down 90%.
The good news: Most can get covered for $75/month no matter pre-existing conditions.
The problem: almost no one knows that after Dec 15 it will be too late to get covered.https://t.co/qMJsC3POpl
— Andy Slavitt (@ASlavitt) November 29, 2018
Many Obamacare supporters were unnerved by a poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation showing that, just one in four of those who are uninsured or purchase coverage on their own knew that open enrollment ended on Dec. 15, while 61 percent outright said they didn’t know. They have attributed this to the lack of advertising budget.
But the lack of awareness of key Obamacare dates and benefits has not been any sort of new problem, as it was also an issue during the Obama administration, when the president was using all tools at his disposal to expand enrollment.
For instance, a poll taken in 2015 by Agile Insurance showed that a nearly identical 60 percent of consumers said they didn’t know when open enrollment ended, and just 18 percent gave the correct date for the deadline. In October 2014, nine in ten uninsured were unaware that open enrollment was going to start just a few weeks later, on Nov. 1st.
It’s possible that the issue is that there were a certain number of people who weren’t interested in purchasing Obamacare, but they were compelled to do so as a result of the tax penalty. Now, they are taking advantage of their increased freedom to go without purchasing coverage.
This shouldn’t actually be a controversial view. Liberals actually predicted a drop-off in enrollment as a result of the revocation of the mandate. If anything, the drop-off may be lower than predictions. The Congressional Budget Office, for instance, predicted in November 2017 that 3 million fewer people would sign up for insurance on the individual market, and the numbers may come up well short of that.
So the question really is more of an ideological one. Republicans, who despite the last gasps of repeal rhetoric have de facto settled on government subsidized insurance as an acceptable status quo, have settled on an argument that the government should make insurance available for people, but that they shouldn’t be forced to purchase it. Liberals, meanwhile, won’t feel satisfied unless everybody purchases health insurance, regardless of whether they want it.
