The 2020 open enrollment period on HealthCare.gov ended on Dec. 18 after an unplanned extension, but Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Seema Verma touted the system’s stability.
“We are reporting that for the third year in a row enrollment in the Federal Exchange remained stable,” she said in a statement. “For all our successes, too many Americans who do not qualify for subsidies still cannot afford premiums that remain in the stratosphere – constituting a new class of uninsured. The Affordable Care Act remains fundamentally broken and nothing less than wholesale reforms can fix it.”
The open enrollment period was scheduled to end on Dec. 15, but some individuals had problems signing up for coverage that day so the CMS extended the deadline to Dec. 18. During that last “week,” consumers selected over 4.4 million plans – 3.4 million were renewals and just under 1 million were new – bringing the cumulative total for the 2020 enrollment period to 8.3 million plans selected from Nov. 1 to Dec. 17, CMS reported.
Plans selected during the last 3 hours of open enrollment – 12:00 a.m. to 3:00 a.m. on Dec. 18 – are not included in the weekly or final counts, so it’s still possible that the 2020 enrollment could surpass last year’s total of 8.45 million plan selections. The fully updated enrollment data will be released during the second week of January, CMS said.