WASHINGTON — About 20 million people signed up for health insurance through the Affordable Care Act marketplaces this year, a record number.
President Joe Biden is likely to announce these results regularly on the campaign trail in the coming months, while former President Donald Trump, the Republican front-runner, vows to dismantle the Obama-era program.
The Biden administration announced Wednesday morning that 20 million people have signed up for marketplace coverage, days before the open enrollment period ends on Jan. 16.
The latest enrollment projections mean a quarter more Americans signed up for coverage this year than last year – another record year with 16.3 million people enrolled in the program. Enrollment surged after Biden took office, with Democrats rolling out a series of tax breaks that give millions of Americans access to low-cost plans, some with zero-dollar premiums.
“We must build on this progress and make these lower health care premiums permanent,” Biden said in a statement. “But extreme Republicans have blocked these efforts at every turn.”
The country’s top health official on Wednesday attributed the aroused interest in the reporting to an aggressive campaign to get people registered. The administration has been working with nonprofits across the country, including in predominantly Black and Latino communities like South Florida, to bring new awareness to people. The administration has also invested millions of dollars in hiring navigators to help people register, a program that was decimated when President Donald Trump, a longtime critic of so-called “Obamacare,” was in power.
“The previous administration made no effort to let people know what they could get,” Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said during an interview with MSNBC’s Morning Joe. “We’re out there, we’re not waiting for them to come to us. We’re going to them.”
But the increased enrollment news that the Biden administration celebrated on Wednesday has not come without costs. Some of the millions of new enrollees have turned to the market only because they have been excluded from Medicaid, the nearly free health care coverage offered to the poorest Americans or people with disabilities. The health plans they purchase through the marketplace will have higher premiums and copays for services.
About 14.5 million Americans were recently dismissed from Medicaid after the federal government lifted a three-year ban that prohibited states from removing ineligible people from government-sponsored health insurance. States began purging Medicaid for millions of people last year, in an error-plagued process that in some states unfairly left thousands of children and pregnant women without health insurance.
Trump, meanwhile, regularly threatens during his campaign to undo the Biden administration’s work on former President Barack Obama’s health care law.
“Obamacare is a catastrophe, no one is talking about it,” Trump said at a rally in Iowa on Saturday. The former president then criticized the late Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona for blocking the Republican Party’s efforts to dodge the law more than five years ago.
Although open enrollment for health insurance purchased through the Affordable Care Act ends Jan. 16, people who have been removed from Medicaid may be eligible to enroll through the end of July.