In the second last week of December, the number of people who signed up in the state rose by 56,000.
Texans have recently started to flock to the Texas health insurance exchange and have been signing up for plans that will allow them to comply with the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate, raising the numbers by a massive 56,000 people within the second last week of December alone.
The total number of people who have enrolled in the state has reached just short of 1.1 million.
These figures were released by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, as the Texas health insurance marketplace is federally operated. These figures reflect not only the people who signed up for their coverage for the first time, but also people who were automatically re-enrolled after having signed up in previous years without cancelling. They reflect the figures as of December 26, 2015.
Across the country, there have been approximately 8.5 million people enrolled including the Texas health insurance numbers.
That number reflects both the state and federally run health insurance marketplaces up to the eighth week of the enrollment period. Among those in the 8.5 million, about 2.4 million of them were automatically enrolled after having been previously signed up. The reason is that if consumers do not make any changes to their enrollment through cancellation or the selection of a different plan or level of coverage, they are automatically re-enrolled in their previous plan in order to ensure that there won’t be a gap in their coverage.
During the week in which Christmas fell, last year, approximately 275,000 people across the country enrolled in their health insurance plans. That said, the week in which the largest amount of enrollment and re-enrollment occurred was from December 13 through December 19. That was an anticipated surge in registrations as the deadline was December 17 for starting a plan on January 1, so everyone who left their decision until the last minute had to enroll at that time or they risked missing the deadline.
The open enrollment period for federal and Texas health insurance began last year on November 1 and will continue right through until January 31.