The open enrollment period for getting some delicious, socialist (haha not socialist) Obamacare ended on February 15, so if you were planning to enroll and didn't, you are out of luck, so sorry. But if you are one of the 11.4 million people who DID enroll through an ACA marketplace during the most recent enrollment period, then you will have health insurance as soon as you pay your first premium -- actually, go ahead and do that right now, we'll wait -- and now you are free to go get that checkup you were putting off! Hooray! What have congressional Republicans said about the ACA since the awesome enrollment numbers were released earlier this week? Oh, absolutely nothing as of Wednesday afternoon, and shush, please don't bother them, they are busy trying to shut down the government again.
The administration had projected that 10.3 million people would enroll during this period, so this means a whole extra million people signed up who weren't even in the administration's projection. That number is likely to shrink a bit in the final analysis -- last year, about one million people failed to pay their premiums and lost their coverage (srsly, pay yr premiums) -- but it is also likely to grow a little bit if the administration opens a brief enrollment period in April to give people one more chance to sign up rather than pay a tax penalty for not having insurance.
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The number of uninsured people who owe the penalty (and who may be eligible to enroll in April, if the administration is nice enough and/or savvy enough to let them buy insurance rather than pay the tax penalty) may be as high as six million, so get ready for this to be a major Republican talking point until around late April. We can hardly wait for Fox News to interview every single one of those six million people to hear their sad stories about how the government is murdering their freedom by requiring them to have health insurance provided by a private insurance company, which is exactly like socialism, except for how it is not.
So everything is great in Obamacare world, and millions of people have health insurance, including one million more than projected, and we are not even thinking about King v. Burwell, in which SCOTUS might strike down the federal subsidy part of the law and send all of us plus our pets into a death spiral. We are NOT. Also, if you are a new enrollee, pay your premium and enjoy yourself some healthcare. Yay!
