Despite technical glitches and political uncertainty, enrollment in Affordable Care Act health plans remained stable going into 2020. As of Dec. 17, more than 8.3 million people enrolled through the federal ACA exchanges, down just 2.4 percent from last year.
Market Trends to Watch for Health Systems and Their Specialty Pharmacies
The future looks bright for the integrated specialty pharmacy model – for health systems, providers, and most importantly, for patients.
These figures do not include the millions of users that enrolled in state-based exchanges, such as in California, Massachusetts, and most recently, Nevada.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services attributed the slight decline in enrollees to low unemployment rates, Nevada’s transition to a state-based exchange, and Medicaid expansion in Maine, which would make an estimated 12,000 residents newly eligible for Medicaid.
“We are reporting that for the third year in a row enrollment in the Federal Exchange remained stable,” CMS Administrator Seema Verma said in a news release. “Far from undermining the Affordable Care Act – as some hysterical and inaccurate claims would have it – the Trump Administration is making the very best of what remains a failed experiment.”
“For all our successes, too many Americans who do not qualify for subsidies still cannot afford premiums that remain in the stratosphere – constituting a new class of uninsured. The Affordable Care Act remains fundamentally broken and nothing less than wholesale reforms can fix it,” she added.
Heard at HLTH 2024: Insights from Innovative Healthcare Executives
Executives from Imagine360, Verily, BrightInsight, Lantern, and Rhapsody shared their approaches to reducing healthcare costs and facilitating digital transformation.
More than half of consumers, 4.42 million, selected plans during the final week of open enrollment. In total, the federal exchanges saw 2.06 million new enrollees and 6.24 million consumers renewing coverage.
This year’s enrollment period came to a bumpy conclusion. An outage on Dec. 15, the last day to enroll, prompted CMS to extend the deadline for enrollment to Dec. 18.
These preliminary figures include consumers who were granted an extension because they were not able to enroll on the 15th, but it does not include those who enrolled between midnight and 3 a.m. on December 18. CMS plans to share final enrollment data in the second week of January.
Recent decisions have thrown the future of the ACA into uncertainty. On Dec. 18, a federal appeals court struck down the individual mandate penalty. More recently on Friday, the 2.3% tax on medical devices was eliminated when President Donald Trump signed a bipartisan spending bill.
Photo credit: Joe Raedle, Getty Images