Obama Administration to Quit Releasing Monthly Reports on Obamacare Enrollment

Concerned that the Obama
administration has perhaps been a little too forthcoming with
enrollment data under the health care law? Well, you can stop
worrying. They’re about to put a stop to that.

Throughout the law’s open enrollment period, the Department of
Health and Human Services (HHS) released regular reports tabulating
sign-ups, state-by-state totals, demographic breakdowns, and other
information under the health law.

The reports were frustrating in many ways and often did not
provide all the data that we would have ideally liked to see. But
they were a regularly updated source of official health law
figures—a partial but useful measure of some of what was happening
under the law.

But with open enrollment over, and the midterm campaign season
under way, the administration has apparently decided that it’s no
longer necessary to provide such information on a regular basis.
The monthly reports are set to end, according to a report earlier
this week in Politico, and the administration won’t reveal
what sort of data it will share in the future, saying only that “we
will look at future opportunities to share information about the
marketplace that is reliable and accurate over time as further
analysis can be done.”

This will make it very difficult to determine what is happening
to enrollment during the “off season.” Even though open enrollment
has ended, there are still a variety of major life events—job loss,
moves across state lines, the birth of a child—that qualify someone
to get coverage through the exchange. But without regular,
consistent reports, it’s going to be essentially impossible to see
what that churn looks like. Will enrollment rise, or fall, or stay
flat during the months between open enrollment periods? Without
recurring reports, we really won’t know.

Even more worrying is that Politico reports that it’s
not clear that HHS plans to publish the reports again later this
year, when the next open enrollment period begins. So we may not
just end up in the dark about the off season—we may end up without
useful, consistent data about what’s happening when the enrollment
game is on either.

It’s hard to look at this move and see anything other than
political motivation at work. What reason would the administration
have for not reporting this information except hiding numbers that
could be inconvenient? Yes, open enrollment is over, but enrollment
changes will continue every month. And it’s not as if these reports
represent a particular drain on resources; the administration will
have this information internally—it has to, in order to manage its
end of the law—so it’s really only a matter of whether it gets
formatted for the public and released.

Obviously we don’t know for certain what the motivation is here,
but I’ll put it this way: If the reports were likely to contain
good news for the law, then it’s difficult to imagine that the
administration would be discontinuing them.