There are already 600,000 people who have signed up for their plans through the official marketplaces.
According to a recent reports on the latest ACA health insurance enrollments, registrations are up and look very promising. In fact, more than half a million people have already enrolled, 23 percent of whom are new to the insurance exchanges.
Despite President Trump’s claims that the Affordable Care Act marketplace was collapsing, it’s growing.
“More than 600,000 people signed up last week for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, significantly beating the pace of prior years as consumers defied President Trump’s assertion that the marketplace was collapsing,” said a recent New York Times report by domestic correspondent Robert Pear.
During the first full business week of open enrollment, ACA health insurance sign ups over the federal exchange, healthcare.gov, averaged 150,000 per day. Comparatively, in 2015, the first full business week saw 77,600 enrollments per day. That represents a considerable rate of growth in the pace of registrations for health plans through the insurance exchange.
Furthermore, 23 percent of those who have enrolled did not have ACA health insurance last year.
Among the Americans who have used the federal health insurance exchange already this year, nearly a quarter had not used in last year. This represents an exceptionally healthy rate of growth among new users of the Affordable Care Act’s federal insurance marketplace.
The industry had been very concerned about the fate of the open enrollment period within the marketplace as President Trump recently decided to cut its advertising budget down to a small fraction of what it had previously been. In fact, the Affordable Care Act’s health plan registration budget was hacked down by 90 percent.
Furthermore, President Trump also signed an executive order to cut off the subsidies to health insurance companies in a cost-sharing program that were meant to help keep down out-of-pocket expenses for policyholders. Topping off the insurance industries concerns was the presidents reduction of the open enrollment period to half of what it had previously been.
Still, despite all these efforts to reduce the time available, to reduce the information distributed to the American public and to drive up the cost of coverage, so far consumers appear to be using the ACA health insurance marketplace more than they have in previous years.
