8.8 million people sign up for ObamaCare.
A surprisingly high number of people signed up under the law in the enrollment period that ended last week: 8.8 million, just short of the 9.2 million from last year.
And that was despite the Trump administration’s attacks on the health-care law, cutbacks on outreach and an enrollment period that was half as long as previous ones.
The enrollment numbers suggest that a core group of people, though smaller than what architects of the law originally imagined, wants health insurance and will sign up despite any obstacles in their way.
“The ACA seems to have more lives than your neighborhood cat,” said Larry Levitt, a health policy expert at the Kaiser Family Foundation.
“It’s a smaller and less functional program than supporters had originally hoped, but it’s still doing the job of [keeping] the uninsured rate at the lowest level ever,” he added.
Ironically, the surprisingly high enrollment numbers announced this week are in part due to an action President Trump took that seemed aimed at hurting ObamaCare, experts say.
Trump cut off key payments to insurers known as cost-sharing reductions. To make up for the lost revenue, insurers raised premiums, but cleverly used the structure of ObamaCare to raise prices only on certain plans. That had the effect of increasing government subsidies that help people afford insurance.
The end result was a convoluted way to increase subsidies, which actually made plans more affordable for many people, helping to entice them to buy coverage.