That final week brought a surge in people applying for coverage, taking the total number of sign-ups to just over 8 million-better than the 7 million enrollments that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) had predicted when the law passed, and far better than the revised estimate of 6 million the CBO predicted after the website crashed. Progress was being made.Īt the end of March, Obamacare's first open enrollment period-the timeframe during which anyone is allowed to sign for coverage each year-came to a close, providing an opportunity to benchmark the controversial new system's performance. In January, the administration fired the technology contractor that had built the federal exchange. Exchanges run by densely populated states such as California and New York were reporting brisk traffic and hundreds of thousands of sign-ups. An end of year sign-up surge showed not only that the system could handle increased traffic volume, but that there might be real demand for the insurance being sold. Reasonīut in December, following a series of frantic all-hands-on-deck repair efforts by the administration's tech team, the federal exchange began to function normally. More than a few Republicans in Congress confidently predicted that the law would soon collapse under its own weight. Reporting would later come out that top officials were actively considering scrapping the health exchange system they had spent three years building, and starting over from scratch. "Hundreds of thousands of Americans are submitting their applications successfully to get into the system and enroll in Obamacare, and they are doing it through a variety of means, through state exchanges and through the call-in centers and that's going to continue."īehind the scenes, however, the White House was terrified. "This system is not failing," embattled White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told CNN in October. mode, assuring Americans that, despite a few bumps in the road, all was okay. The rollout was bad enough that the Obama administration was gritting its teeth in full crisis-P.R. It seemed entirely plausible that between the cancellations and the website failures, Obamacare's expansion of insurance coverage-the main selling point of a $2 trillion overhaul of the health care system-might end up making no meaningful dent in the uninsured rate at all. Thousands of applications were stranded inside the glitchy exchange systems. The law's mandated small business exchange had been delayed, as had its Spanish language website. Millions of people with individual health insurance policies received letters indicating that their existing coverage would be canceled. Many exchanges run by state governments were in disarray as well. The main federal exchange, which served as an insurance hub for 36 states, was down more often than it was up, and when it was online, it didn't work. Will Obamacare survive? Has it been beneficial? While we cannot say with certainty that Obamacare has led to lower premiums, we can say that it has provided coverage for millions of previously uninsured Americans.In the first weeks after Obamacare's health insurance exchanges launched on October 1, 2013, almost nothing worked. I was not alone as this part of the ACA has since been removed. When Justice Roberts cast the deciding vote in favor of the penalty tax, I was surprised at the logic behind the ruling. If this cannot be done, they could strike it down. Even if part of the ACA is deemed unconstitutional, Justice Barrett has stated that she would determine if that part of the law could be severed, leaving the ACA intact. I expect the court will examine the components of the law to see if any part fails to meet constitutional muster. While short of a formal declaration, unless the court finds the law to be unconstitutional, it will likely survive. Supreme Court, with a conservative majority, has signaled that it may not eliminate the ACA. Number & Percent of Uninsured Americans (2009 to 2019) MJP
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