The ACA enrollment numbers for October were released this afternoon:
A little more than 106,000 people selected insurance plans during the new health-care law’s first month of open enrollment, the Obama administration announced Wednesday. Approximately 27,000 of those sign-ups came from 36 states where the federal government is running the exchange, which has been beset with technical difficulties. The additional 79,000 came through the 15 marketplaces run by states and the District of Columbia.
Josh Marshall puts the Healthcare.gov numbers in context:
I believe roughly a third of the country’s population is in states with exchanges (14 states, including California and New York). Mainly the state sites have been working well, in tech terms. And that gives you a sense of the full impact of the botched launch of healthcare.gov. The functioning websites were able to sign up three times as many people from only one-third of the country’s population.
Robert Laszewski chastises the administration:
The audacity of this administration to continue telling people to keep going back to the website and the call center when they knew full well that only 25 people per day per state were making it thorough the gauntlet that is Healthcare.gov is startling.
On the bright side, Chait notes that almost 400,000 people enrolled in Medicaid:
Why have so many more people enrolled in Medicaid than the exchanges? Because it’s a much easier decision. If you’re below a certain income threshold, and you don’t live in one of the states run by politicians with a sociopathic indifference to the basic human needs of their most vulnerable citizens, then you have one option for subsidized health care: Medicaid. Nobody loves being on Medicaid, but it’s better than nothing, so you enroll.
Sarah Kliff and Ezra Klein list nine facts about the numbers. Among them:
It’s not quite right to say 106,856 have actually bought a plan. The White House is also counting people who have placed a plan in their shopping cart but haven’t yet paid.
Another important detail:
Lots of shoppers on HealthCare.gov are turning to paper applications. Thirty-three percent of sign-ups in the federal exchange have been done offline. In states, that number stands at just 3 percent.
Jonathan Cohn thinks it’s too early to draw any firm conclusions about the law:
The October numbers are low, which was to be expected given the website problems and tendency of people not to buy insurance right away. But what matters isn’t the figures for October or even November. It’s December and the months that follow—particulalry into next year, as the prospect of paying fines for uninsurance start to hit people in the face. “It’s too early to say anything useful,” says Jonathan Gruber, professor of economics at MIT. “And, really, I don’t think we can draw any significant conclusions about effectiveness of the law until March, because any firm conclusion requires effects of indivdiual mandate to be felt.”
The Dish 