Southern states are seeing a
surge of Obamacare sign-ups in this last week of open enrollment.
Texas, Louisiana, South Carolina and Mississippi have each seen 80 percent more signups compared to last year, Deputy Administrator Andy Slavitt said.
The same states are also reporting the fastest rate of growth in the final two weeks of the current enrollment period, which ends Feb. 15. Each of the states has reported 5 percent more signups over the last two weeks compared to last year.
That's more than 1 million in Texas, around 180,000 in South Carolina, 150,000 in Louisiana and 90,000 in Mississippi. Florida
tops them with 1.3 million signups.
Which means the problem Republicans have brought on themselves—what to do if the Supreme Court waves its magic wand and kills subsidies in these states—is going to be even bigger than previously thought. Even before this year's enrollments, we knew that the people most likely to lose their insurance are white, employed, middle-class southerners, otherwise known as the GOP base. Now there's going to be even more of them set to lose the insurance they just got.
Now, Republicans can continue to pretend that they're coming up with some big plan to fix the mess they've created for themselves, and the Supreme Court might just buy it and go ahead and end subsidies for the people in all these red states. But the reality is—and Republicans admit this themselves—they don't have a plan that could pass. Worse, they don't really care about fixing it. They'll probably start caring when they start getting irate phone calls from their voters, but then it will be too late.