12.7 Million Select Plans During Open Enrollment

About 12.7 million consumers selected health insurance plans through the Health 
Insurance Marketplaces during the 13 weeks of Open Enrollment, the Department of Health and Human Services announced.

Of the total, over 9.6 million came through the HealthCare.gov platform, and 3.1 million more selected a plan through State-based Marketplaces. In addition, during the Open Enrollment period nearly 400,000 people signed up for New York’s new Basic Health Program, and about 33,000 people signed up for Minnesota’s Basic Health Program.

The formal deadline for Open Enrollment was midnight on January 31, but HHS extended enrollment through Monday, February 1, to include consumers who were in the process of completing their applications.

“Across the country, about 12.7 million Americans selected affordable, quality health plans for 2016 coverage, exceeding our goals,” said HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell. “That includes over 4 million new consumers in the HealthCare.gov, states.”

The 4 million new customers, about 42% of the total, do not include new plan selections from State-based Marketplaces, HHS noted, so the total number of new consumers for 2016 will increase.

About 3.9 million of the total were returning Marketplace consumers who actively selected a plan, and another 1.7 million were automatically re-enrolled by the Marketplace.

Because of improvements HHS made in automating transactions with insurers, this year’s totals for plan selection take into account cancellations during Open Enrollment initiated by consumers or insurers. Last year’s totals only accounted for consumer-initiated cancellations. As a result, this year’s totals include a larger number of cancellations during, rather than after, Open Enrollment.

A more detailed report that looks at plan selections across all states for the entire Open Enrollment period will be released by HHS at a later time.

More than 686,700 consumers selected Affordable Care Act health insurance plans through the Healthcare.gov online marketplace during the 13th week of Open Enrollment, HHS reported. The volume for the week of Jan. 23 to Feb. 1. This was up sharply from the 103,000 who selected insurance plans during the 12th week of enrollment.

The Healthcare.gov site had 5.3 million visitors in Week 13, more than double the 2.7 million visitors in Week 12, compared to 3.1 million visitors the prior week. The Spanish-language CuidadoDeSalud.gov site had over 276,400 visitors; the total was about 202,000 the week before.

More than 1.3 million visitors used the “window shopping” feature on Healthcare.gov, along with nearly 28,000 on CuidadoDeSalud.gov. The comparable figures for the prior week were about 492,500 visitors for Healthcare.gov and 11,300 for CuidadoDeSalud.gov.

For English-speaking consumers, phone calls to the HHS call center totaled 2.1 million, more than double the 918,600 of prior week. The average hold time was 14 minutes and 50 seconds, triple the four minutes and 25 seconds in Week 12.

Calls to Spanish-speaking representatives totaled more than 276,400, compared to just 74,000 the prior week. Average wait times were about 54 seconds, compared to 14 seconds a week

Individual plan selections for the states using the HealthCare.gov platform include:

HealthCare.gov Local Market Snapshot