President Obama: Affordable Care Act is working better than anticipated
More than 11 million people have purchased coverage on the health insurance exchanges for 2015, according to preliminary figures released in a video the White House posted on Facebook on Tuesday.
In the video, President Barack Obama and Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell said an estimated 11.4 million people signed up or re-enrolled during the open enrollment period, which ended on Feb. 15. However, the deadline has been extended to Feb. 22 for people who had trouble logging on to the federal government’s Healthcare.gov website. Many states also have given people an extra week.
Burwell said more people signed up on Feb. 15 than any other day since the marketplaces opened for enrollment in October 2013.
“It gives you some sense of how hungry people were out there for affordable, accessible health insurance,” President Obama said. “That’s really the top line message. The Affordable Care Act is working. It’s working a little better than we anticipated. It’s certainly working a lot better than many of the critics talked about early on.”
Despite technical glitches that marred the early rollout of the exchanges, 8 million people signed up for coverage on the exchanges by April 2014, although the numbers fell to 6.7 million in November because people decided not to pay the monthly premiums or found insurance elsewhere.
In 2015, most people will be penalized for not having insurance. The minimum penalty is $325 per person or 2 percent of a person’s income.
On March 4, the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear the King v. Burwell case that is challenging the federal government’s use of subsidies to help offset the costs of premiums for people who have trouble purchasing insurance. If the subsidies are no longer in place, millions of people may be in danger of losing their coverage because it would be too expensive.
Executive Editor
Tim Casey joined TriMed Media Group in 2015 as Executive Editor. For the previous four years, he worked as an editor and writer for HMP Communications, primarily focused on covering managed care issues and reporting from medical and health care conferences. He was also a staff reporter at the Sacramento Bee for more than four years covering professional, college and high school sports. He earned his undergraduate degree in psychology from the University of Notre Dame and his MBA degree from Georgetown University.