With all the fuss & bother over when, or whether, the Trumpublicans will repeal and/or replace Obamacare (Actual name: the Affordable Care Act), it’s vitally important to remember that the 2017 Open Enrollment Period is currently ongoing, and that tomorrow, December 15th, is the deadline for anyone who wants coverage starting on January 1st.
There are some caveats to this of course:
- CALIFORNIA: CoveredCA just announced that they’re bumping their deadline out by two days, to midnight on Saturday, Dec. 17th.
- MASSACHUSETTS, RHODE ISLAND & WASHINGTON STATE*: The deadline in these 2 states is Friday, Dec. 23rd.
*(WA is pushing people to enroll by tomorrow night as well, but their official deadline for January coverage is the 23rd, like MA & RI).
It’s conceivable that there will be additional deadline extensions in some of the other states, but that’s highly unlikely these days.
If you miss the December deadline (for coverage starting in January), you can still sign up as late as January 31st (assuming Trumpublicans don’t pull the plug right away):
- Sign up between 12/16/16 — 1/15/17 for coverage starting February 1st
- Sign up between 1/16/17 — 1/31/17 for coverage starting March 1st
After that, you’re pretty much SOL unless you have a qualifying life change (getting married, giving birth, etc)...and even that’s very much in doubt with the GOP breathing down the ACA’s neck.
As you can see above, as of today, enrollments are tracking my pre-election projections almost perfectly; I projected exactly 4.0 million ACA enrollments via HealthCare.Gov as of 12/10; actual enrollments? 4,015,709. The same seems true nationally; I projected that national enrollments will break the 7.0 million mark by midnight tonight, and have confirmed 6.68 million so far...which doesn’t include several states.
I’m actually rather surprised at how closely the actual numbers are hewing to my projections, given that I made them in late October, before the election, when pretty much everyone assumed Hillary would win and the ACA would be in no danger of being repealed (or at least no more danger than it has been for years now).
However, it’s important to note that while the total numbers to date are exactly what I’ve been expecting, the ratio between renewing enrollees and new folks signing up is not. So far there’s around 16% fewer new enrollees than I’d expect by now...and since the total is tracking perfectly, that means that these are being cancelled out by current enrollees who are actively renewing/switching to a different plan earlier than I’d have expected.
There’s nothing wrong with that, but it does suggest that things may drop off or even flatline starting next week, after the deadline passes and the remaining auto-renewals are plugged into the system.
In any event, if you haven’t signed up yet, I strongly advise you to do so before the deadline. Even now, with a full day left to go, traffic volume at HC.gov is very high (they even had the “Waiting Room” page displaying last time I checked it out):
In terms of where things stand so far, here’s how the state-by-state numbers look at the moment: 14 states are ahead of where I expected them to be as of December 10th (the vertical red line below); 9 states are behind my expectations. 5 seem to be way ahead but are special cases, while 6 states either have no data at all yet or, in the case of Colorado, the data is so out of date it’s basically irrelevant.
Total enrollments (at the bottom) appear to be way ahead, but that’s because there’s an additional 700,000 enrollees which came in on the 12th and 13th, while the red line is set for the 10th.
It takes an awful lot of time and effort to maintain the ACA Signups website. If anyone’s in a position to help support the ACA Signups project, it would be tremendously appreciated.