New Jersey bucked a national trend of declining enrollment in Obamacare health insurance, but just barely, according to the tally released by the Trump administration.
January provided a roller-coaster timetable for consumers: They could sign up for subsidized health insurance through the 31st, if they were eligible.
Yet a new president took office Jan. 20, and one of his first actions was to sign an executive order aimed at withdrawing support of the Affordable Care Act.
Television and radio commercials that had always aired during the last week of enrollment to warn procrastinators of the upcoming deadline were cancelled – then reinstated after protest.
There is usually a surge of about 700,000 people signing up on the federal Obamacare website, healthcare.gov, at the last minute. This year, however, that number was cut nearly in half, to 375,000.That meant an overall drop in the number of Americans who now purchase their policies through the federal marketplace.
Nationally, roughly 12.2 million signed up for Obamacare in 2017, versus 12.7 million in 2016 through the federal marketplace and state-run exchanges.
In New Jersey, though, the situation was markedly different.
The pace of new enrollments dropped once Trump took office, but by the close of the open enrollment window, 295,067 New Jersey residents had acquired insurance through the federal marketplace.
That’s a about a two percent increase over last year’s enrollment of 288,573.
Those policies are contracts with private insurance companies that remain in effect through all of 2017, no matter what happens in Washington.
Health policy experts say it’s impossible to discern the motives for the “missing” people in the national total: Perhaps they have stayed away because they simply didn’t want health insurance and were betting President Donald Trump would do away with the fine.
Or they may have stayed away because they didn’t realize the deadline was approaching.
One clue is offered by a comparison between the states that rely on the federal marketplace – and thus saw no last-minute ad blitz, and the states that run their own exchanges.
The state exchanges, which run their own publicity campaigns, saw jumps in enrollment.
While New Jersey doesn’t run its own exchange, residents here were exposed to advertising out of neighboring New York, as well as to a marketing push from the major carrier here, Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey.
Also different this year was the tone of the government press release announcing the enrollment tallies. Under President Obama, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services typically emphasized what was going well with the program.
Under the Trump administration, the press release highlighted the Affordable Care Act’s problems. It noted, “These selections were made from a market that experienced a 25 percent increase over the previous year in the average premium for the benchmark second-lowest cost silver plan as well as a 28 percent decline in the number of issuers participating over the past year.”
Kathleen O’Brien may be reached at kobrien@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @OBrienLedger. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
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