Week 6: Enrollment at HealthCare.gov continues to defy expectations

CMS announced that overall nearly 4.7 million people have signed up for health coverage through the sixth week of Open Enrollment which ended on December 9. That’s still by about 650,000 more sign-ups than at the similar point last year. More importantly, new enrollment is up nearly 17% over the equivalent week last year — a good sign for the final surge of enrollment.

Keep in mind that the cumulative data CMS released today is for 39 out of 45 days of enrollment this year compared to 42 days for OE3 and 40 days for OE4 out of 90 days. See the tables below for a daily, week-by-week, and graph comparisons for sign-ups, new enrollment and returning consumers.

Here’s our take from Get America Covered:

The latest enrollment report from CMS shows that despite the shortened enrollment period, the lack of outreach and other efforts by the Trump administration to undermine Open Enrollment, enrollments this year continue to defy expectations. There is little doubt that with demand as strong as it is that more people would have signed up for coverage this year than last if not for the shortened enrollment period.

Overall, demand for health coverage continues to outpace demand from previous years showing just how much people value having health insurance. What’s more, nearly 1.4 million new consumers have signed up for coverage. Comparing enrollment during the first 6 weeks this year to the equivalent period last year, shows that cumulative sign-ups continue to outpace previous years and overall is up by about 650,0000 or 17%.

It’s important to note that the change week over week indicates that the pace of new enrollments has increased while the pace of returning enrollments has slowed slightly compared to last year. While total enrollment for Week 6 was on par with Week 6 last year, just 6,000 more people signed up, new enrollment is up by nearly 60,000 — a 17% increase over Week 6 last year. Returning enrollment slowed relative to last year, but given cumulative renewal is still up 13% this year compared to last year this isn’t surprising.

Historically, we’ve seen the start of the deadline surge in the week before the final deadline. Given the lack of outreach this year, many consumers are still learning that the final deadline this year is on December 15. Given the higher demand we’ve seen in California and New York — states where the Open Enrollment Period was not shortened — we can only imagine the kind of enrollment we’d be seeing in these final weeks had the outreach budget not been cut this year.

Week 6: Cumulative Totals and Daily Averages

Open Enrollment 6: Weekly Comparison

State-by-State Comparison

Every state, besides Louisiana and West Virginia, continues to show enrollment growth over last year. Total sign-ups are up between 37% and 22% compared to last year in the top 10 states: Mississippi, Wyoming, Texas, North Dakota, Arkansas, Hawaii, Iowa, Oklahoma, Nevada and Alaska.

OE4 vs OE5 Comparison

In each of the following graphs the blue line tracks cumulative enrollment by week during the 5th Open Enrollment Period (OE5) and the orange line during the 4th Open Enrollment (OE4). We have a graph for Total, New and Returning enrollment. For each data point, we’ve included the change over the equivalent week during the previous year.

Graph 1: Cumulative Returning Enrollment by Week OE4 vs OE5

The schedule for returning enrollment this year is essentially the same — so the increases we are seeing in active renewal are akin to an apples to apples comparison. The gap between this year’s returning performance and last year’s is rapidly closing. But returning enrollment continues to track well ahead of last year — if this trend continues the gap may close entirely.

Graph 2: Cumulative New Enrollment by Week OE4 vs OE5

Once again, the schedule for new enrollment is very different this year — the administration cut open enrollment in half. This week, even though the percentage dropped slightly, the raw number of new actually increased by nearly 60,000.

Graph 3: Cumulative Total Enrollment by Week OE4 vs OE5