Open Obamacare enrollment for 2015 starts Saturday, November 15, but the
window-shopping on the federal site is available now. That likely means that the load-testing the administration has been conducting for the last several weeks has gone well, and Healthcare.gov is functioning well.
Potential Obamacare customers can peek at 2015 prices for the program’s health plans today after the government released a “window-shopping” feature overnight. […]
“We have been working in a number of areas to raise the bar,” Andy Slavitt, the deputy director of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which runs healthcare.gov, told reporters yesterday on a conference call to preview the feature. “Our principal focus is to bring people back to the website so they can update their information and shop for the best values. That’s our principal focus, is to get people to come back.”
As has been
noted here it's particularly important for current enrollees to shop around and to not just auto-enroll, because changes in this years policies and the addition of dozens of new insurers can mean changes in the subsidies people are eligible for. There's also potentially better deals out there to be found.
While the administration is confident that the website will be much more functional when enrollments begin for real on Saturday, it's being cautious in its predictions of the number of new enrollees expected for next year. While the CBO is projecting 13 million new sign-ups, the administration is predicting between 9 and 9.9 million to get coverage by the end of 2015.
Confusion about the status of the law is likely to be a factor that the administration has to contend with this year. Between a new Republican Senate that will be calling for—and voting on—repeal, (as well as repeat votes in the House) and the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to take action on the subsidies case, there's bound to be plenty of confusion about whether the law even still exists. There's something Republicans can be proud of: spouting so much bullshit, people don't even try to get insurance.