| | | New Obamacare signups for this year are only 1.9 million as most customers are re-enrolled AUTOMATICALLY and there's little chance of reaching the 13 million total Congress says the program needs
Just 1.9 million have signed up this year so far
Most renewals are on autopilot, creating the risk of 'rate shock' when re-upped
Americans get their bills in January
HHS's solution is a plan that would allow the agency to change consumers' coverage levels without their permission
DailyMail.com projects that fewer than 8.3 million Americans will be signed up by the mid-February deadline
That would miss HHS's own 9 million to 9.9 million estimate and fall well short of the Congressional Budget Office's 13 million number
By David Martosko, Us Political Editor For Dailymail.com
Published: 11:21 EST, 24 December 2014 | Updated: 11:24 EST, 24 December 2014
The vast majority of the 6.4 million Americans enrolled in Obamacare coverage for 2015 through Healthcare.gov never clicked a mouse or made a phone call this year: They were re-enrolled on autopilot.
Only 1.9 million signed up on their own, Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell said Tuesday.
Yet even with this help in capturing customers – including reluctant ones – the Obama administration is far behind what Congress' independent bean-counters estimated it would need in order to keep the Affordable Care Act financially afloat.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected the overall number, including people who sign up through state-level marketplaces, at 13 million by the end of the open enrollment period ending February 15.
Big states like California and New York could boost the total, but a DailyMail.com analysis based on population figures indicates that the nationwide total at year's end will be less than 8.3 million.
New York, for instance, had enrolled fewer than 84,000 new customers as of Dec. 20.
The administration will release a full 50-state report next week, Burwell said.
'We still have a lot of work to do,' she told reporters. 'But this is an encouraging start.'
Another HHS official in November told The Hill, an inside-the-beltway newspaper, that the agency's numbers will catch up eventually, but at a slower pace than Congress expected.
'We think the evidence points to a longer ramp-up rate than the CBO projections had, and that is based on what we've learned over the last year from looking at our own data,' the source said then.
But the longer-term outlook could get worse before it gets better: CBO's numbers call for 25 million enrollees by 2018, a number that HHS hasn't said how it can hit. |
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