Producers ready to roll on round two of the Affordable Care Act health insurance exchanges may not be as bogged down as they first thought.
Just five days before the state and federal exchanges go live for the open enrollment period, the Obama administration released estimates on enrollees that differ sharply from initial projections.
According to the Department of Health and Human Services, just 9 million to 9.9 million people will likely get coverage by the end of next year. That’s down from the initial 13 million customers anticipated by the HHS.
Roughly 7.1 million people have health plans through the marketplaces today, the agency said.
Rather than attribute the change in estimates to any mitigating factors, Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell said the new numbers simply represent a more realistic assessment in how quickly Americans can be expected to embrace the open enrollment period.
“We are confident we’re going to have a successful open enrollment,” Burwell said.
The administration also noted that the drop in expected enrollees reflected an increasing number of Americans who will remain enrolled in employer-provided plans.
John Kingdale, who ran Massachusetts’ insurance marketplace through 2010, was more skeptical about the change in estimates. He feels the new numbers suggest a failure on the part of the administration to reach currently uninsured Americans.
“I am concerned that there is not a sufficiently sophisticated outreach effort to get people covered,” Kingdale said.
Those who do enroll may face some difficulty. Reports Monday signal that Burwell is expecting at least a few glitches in the second year of open enrollment despite the hundreds of federal workers who worked for months to rebuild the site.
With fewer weeks to sign up this time around, and the uninsured population growing increasingly difficult to reach, this open enrollment season may actually be more difficult than the last.
