About 11.4 million Americans selected Obamacare healthcare plans through insurance exchanges during the Open Enrollment period, the White House said Tuesday through Twitter and on the HHS blog. This is far ahead of the roughly 8 million people had picked plans after the end of the enrollment window in March 2014.
BREAKING: About 11.4 million Americans are signed up for private health coverage. #11MillionAndCounting #ACAWorks https://t.co/1zKLkyJvlo
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) February 17, 2015
The White House anouncement followed a smooth sign-up period that had relatively very few technological problems compared to the first year of enrollment in 2013.
The latest preliminary figures include millions of people who were automatically enrolled after buying coverage in 2014, as well as people who came back to the sites to change their plan, or new applicants who simply didn’t have any insurance yet. It doesn’t include all of the people who were trying to get coverage when the sign-up deadline passed at 11:59 p.m. Pacific time Sunday. The federal government announced on Monday that it would give those people an extension until Feb 22 to complete their applications.
“It gives you some sense of how hungry people were out there for affordable, accessible health insurance,” Mr. Obama said later in the video. “The Affordable Care Act is working. It’s working a little better than we anticipated. It’s certainly, I think, working a lot better than many of the critics talked about early on.”
All-in, the total puts the administration on track to meet its goal of having between 9.1 to 9.9 million people enrolled in individual coverage through the exchanges by the end of 2015. Consumer wanting to enroll should review the extensions in their state.