2017 Healthcare.gov enrollment down after ads pulled in final week

CMS said 9.2 million people signed up for health coverage through the federal Healthcare.gov site during the open enrollment period that ended Jan. 31, down from 9.6 million reported to have signed up last year.

The final week of open enrollment is typically a busy one, with as many as 800,000 people estimated to have signed up for coverage in the five days of open enrollment before Jan. 31, 2016. This time around, only 376,000 customers signed up between Jan. 15 and 31.

The difference may be explained by a political decision. The new administration of President Donald Trump decided on Jan. 26 to cancel TV ads and some scheduled outreach to customers who hadn’t completed applications. Before Trump took office, enrollment was outpacing 2016 figures.

Independent analyst Charles Gaba, who had called the move an act of “sabotage,” estimated another 250,000 customers may have enrolled in coverage had all outreach and advertisements gone ahead as planned.

A HHS spokesperson took a different view, saying in a statement as the figures were released that “Obamacare has failed the American people, with one broken promise after another.”

Customers had other reasons to shy away. One was the increase in costs for this year, with premiums for the second-lowest cost silver-level plan up by an average of 25 percent. The other was an executive order by Trump instructing federal agencies to grant as many exemptions to the individual mandate penalty as possible in the coming year.

Between pulling ads and leading customers to believe they won’t be penalized for not buying insurance, former Obama administration officials believe the goal of the new HHS administration was to depress enrollment figures.

“They achieved what they wanted,” tweeted former CMS Administrator Andy Slavitt.

The lower enrollment in the final weeks could have a serious impact on insurers participating in the exchanges. The last-minute shoppers tended to be younger, healthier enrollees, a demographic that Obama’s HHS had been focusing on in an effort to improve the marketplace’s risk pool.

The enrollment figures only cover the 39 states which use the federal marketplace, not state-run exchanges.