The federal health-care exchange launched for window shopping 2015 plans last night (customers can start buying this coming Saturday), and the Department of Health and Human Services has released a projection for how many customers will purchase plans on the Obamacare exchanges this year.
It’s much lower than expected: They’re guessing that between 9 and 9.9 million customers will buy exchange plans this enrollment period and throughout 2015, while the Congressional Budget Office had anticipated that the exchanges would cover 13 million people this year. Of course, these expectations are highly unreliable: For most of the disastrous HealthCare.gov rollout last year, most observers didn’t expect enrollment to hit the CBO’s projection of 7 million enrollees . . . until precisely that happened. There were also concerns that many people who purchased plans wouldn’t keep paying premiums, or would disenroll for other reasons, but HHS says that 7.1 million people are currently (partially) paying Obamacare customers.
HHS’s announcement, though, seems to be an effort to lower expectations for the health law’s effects in 2015 — while it appears to have driven down the uninsured rate last year, maybe now it’s not going to expand as much this coming year as had been hoped. One upside to low enrollment in 2015: The federal government saves a lot of money (relative to what the law was supposed to spend otherwise, of course).
Why are HHS’s expectations lower? For one, after a year of enrollment, they’re working with better data than the CBO ever was. But the difference is dramatic: The CBO projected that enrollment in 2015 would almost double, rising 6 million to 13 million. Now, HHS is expecting that it will rise just 2 million, or just one third of what was thought when the bill passed. The Kaiser Foundation’s Larry Leavitt offers a few points about why enrollment just isn’t likely to surge dramatically:
Why might one think 2015 ACA enrollment will be lower?
1. Less public attention.
2. Less outreach $.
3. Remaining uninsured harder to reach.— Larry Levitt (@larry_levitt) November 10, 2014
Expectations for the technical operation of the federal exchange (used by 30-something states) are also not being set sky-high:
Sec. Burwell sets expectations for a not-perfect Obamacare enrollment period: "We will have outages. We will have downtime. "
— Sarah Kliff (@sarahkliff) November 10, 2014