Over 500,000 people have signed up for Obamacare‘s health care plans on its first week of open enrollment, announced Medicaid and Medicare centers on Thursday through the Healthcare.gov official website.
According to CMS, more than 1.2 million citizens have submitted applications so far. Sixty-six percent of the 543,000 people who enrolled were renovating their insurance coverage, and 34 percent of them were new customers seeking to obtain coverage.
The Healthcare.gov platform runs under Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), and the service is available for those who seek more affordable healthcare plans.
“It’s a solid start and I’m pleased with the consumer engagement we’ve seen over this last week. Our partners were ready to work, and people were ready to sign up. We know we have 11 more weeks to go and a lot of hard work still to do,” wrote Sylvia Matthews Burwell, Health and Human Services Secretary, while she also pointed out that it was hard to compare the start of this year’s open enrollment with last year’s, since it started on November 15 back then.
Charles Gaba, responsible for running ACAsignups.net — where you can apply for services under the Affordable Care Act —, said it’s difficult to tell yet what these numbers mean. He assures that it’ll be more certain by December 15, the deadline for those who want to apply for a healthcare insurance plan starting the first day of the year 2016; and the final weeks of January, the deadline of the enrollment period to get coverage for the rest of said year.
The ACAsignups.net site shows estimates for this year’s enrollment count. It predicts around 10 million applications for 2016’s health care plans — a number that surpasses last year’s sum of approximately 9 million people who enrolled.
According to Obama, it will become harder with time to enroll new people who haven’t signed up during the first two years of the Act.
Source: USA Today