All eyes may be focused on the upcoming presidential and congressional elections, but in a little more than one week's time the open enrollment period for the Affordable Care Act, which you likely know better by its shorthand name Obamacare, is set to kickoff.
In each of the three previous enrollment periods we've witnessed total enrollment levels increase. This is probably due in part to some combination of improved understanding of Obamacare and the rising penalties (officially known as the Shared Responsibility Payment) associated with not purchasing health insurance according to the individual mandate.
A staggering number of people could be looking for a new health plan in 2017
But as we head into the 2017 open enrollment period, there's something eerily familiar for consumers to the 2014 open enrollment period: plan discontinuances.
One of President Obama's pledges when the ACA was passed in 2010 was that Americans would be able to keep their doctors. However, that really wasn't a choice that was up to the American public. Instead, it was up to insurers to modernize and beef up their existing health plans to meet the new minimum essential benefit requirements set forth by Obamacare. When a number of insurers simply chose not to update some of their plans for the ACA marketplace, millions of Americans were displaced from potentially longtime plans and forced to seek out new plans, along with new primary care physicians in many cases.
Heading into 2017 we could be looking at a similar story, but for different reasons.
According to Bloomberg, at least 1.4 million people in 32 states will be looking for new healthcare plans this year because their old plans will cease to exist after Dec. 31, 2016. As a reminder, 11.1 million people remained enrolled and paying customers as of March 31, 2016 per the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, meaning more than 1 in 10 Obamacare enrollees are being displaced.
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Posted By: agnes levine
Monday, October 24th 2016 at 9:28AM
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