An early look at the Affordable Care Act’s annual open-enrollment period shows significantly higher sign-ups and traffic than last year, with more than 600,000 people selecting plans through the federal marketplace, Healthcare.gov.
Months of news coverage centered around the GOP Obamacare repeal effort could be partly responsible for the increase in activity, The Wall Street Journal reports.
“You couldn’t have paid for that kind of advertising,” Steve Ringel, an industry official in Ohio, told the Journal.
But it is probably too early to tell whether enrollment numbers will end up higher than last year. For one, President Donald Trump’s decision to end cost-sharing payments to insurers has driven up premiums on many people who don’t receive subsidies but buy insurance through the exchange, and those people could refuse to buy insurance. Plus, insurers have been pushing to enroll people early because the enrollment period is shorter this year.
