Obama Administration Dramatically Scales Back Expectations for Second Year Obamacare Enrollment

The
Obama administration now says it expects the second year of
Obamacare to see dramatically fewer enrollments than originally
projected, and that hitting its long-term enrollment goals will
likely take years longer than initially believed. 

By next year, the Congressional Budget Office
(CBO) estimated
last April, enrollment in private health plans under
Obamacare would increase from its current level to 13 million
people, up from its current level of 7.1 million (a number that has
fallen from the 8 million or so the administration said had signed
up in April.) 

But the Obama administration has consistently declined to
endorse this second-year projection as a target for the health
law’s second open enrollment period—a telling refusal given that
the CBO’s first year enrollment projection was a key metric in
assessing the first year’s outcomes. 

But the administration
announced today that it now expects the figure to rise to
somewhere between 9 and 9.9 million. So instead of adding almost 6
million people to the coverage rolls, it will add fewer than 3
million. That’s a reduction of at least 50 percent, using the
administration’s current 7.1 million enrollment baseline (the CBO
had projected that enrollment would rise from a starting point of 6
million). 

In addition, administration officials said that they believed
enrollment would likely not hit the CBO’s ultimate projection of 25
million private plan enrollments—essentially full enrollment—until
2019 or 2020, three years later than the CBO projected. 

This is a fairly significant rollback of expectations for
Obamacare, and while it might be a way of lowering the bar so that
an underperformance looks like a relative success, it suggests that
the administration is anxious about enrollment trends for year two.
The second year of enrollment was always going to be somewhat more
difficult, because the people most motivated to purchase plans
through Obamacare’s exchanges were likely to have bought in year
one. The task of year two would be to motivate even more people,
those who weren’t already interested in purchasing coverage through
the exchanges.

What this announcement indicates, then, is that the
administration thinks it’s going to have a hard time motivating
many people to purchase plans, which is another way of saying fewer
people than expected seem to want or believe they need insurance
under the law. For whatever reason or reasons, the demand isn’t
there, and Obamacare is now expected to underperform as a
result.