Alex Adrianson of the Heritage Foundation’s “Insider Online” highlights a possible reason for the recent Affordable Care Act enrollment silence.
The Obama administration reported in April that the ObamaCare exchanges had signed up 8 million people, exceeding the target of 7 million enrollees that it said were needed to create a stable insurance pool. So what’s been happening since then? It’s hard to say for sure since the administration stopped providing monthly reports, but there are indications that too many sign-ups are not converting to steady paying customers. Peter Suderman has rounded up some datapoints on the trend:
The latest comes from Florida, where June enrollment in private plans through the federally run insurance exchange in the state is about 760,000—or about 220,000-persons lower than the 980,000 total reported by the administration following the end of open enrollment, according to an official with the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation.
If that figure, reported last week by the South Florida Business Journal, is correct, it represents a 22 percent decline from the total reported by the administration’s Department of Health and Human Services in April. […]
For one of the nation’s largest health insurers, the decline appears to have been pretty steep. Aetna’s 720,000 sign-ups turned into just 600,000 paying customers by June, according to an August Investor’s Business Daily report. The company expects paid enrollment to drop down to close to 500,000 later this year—a roughly 30 percent decline.
