Day 292: Despite Trump’s Best Efforts to Sabotage, Early ACA Enrollments Up Substantially

Donald Trump has tried everything to get rid of — or at the very least, gut — the Affordable Care Act: bombastic speeches, multiple full court presses on Congress, executive orders and ending healthcare subsidies for the poor.

The early numbers on 2018 enrollees are coming in.

So far, Trump has failed.

Trump slashed the outreach budget to let people know they could sign up for an insurance plan for next year.

And yet, early enrollment is up two-fold.

On the first day of enrollment alone, Nov. 1, one source close to the process told The Hill that more than 200,000 people selected a plan for 2018, compared with about 100,000 last year. More than 1 million people visited healthcare.gov that day, compared to about 750,000 last year, the source said.

And those statistics are just part of the story.

These figures capture only a portion of the nation’s overall ACA enrollment, because they encompass states that either use the federal health-care marketplace or rely on its website for their consumers to sign up for coverage. More than a dozen states and the District of Columbia run their own programs and do not use HealthCare.gov.

While it’s early, and the Trump administration cut the enrollment period by about half, don’t shovel dirt on Obamacare just yet.

292 days in, 1170 to go

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