The concerted outreach effort to inform Obamacare enrollees that it would be worth their time to shop around for insurance rather than just automatically re-enroll paid off, with a
significant chunk of those consumers doing just that in 2015.
In the end, about 29 percent of the returning customers—1.2 million people—found new Obamacare insurance this year.
That might not sound like such a large number. But by insurance standards, it is. Among those who said they expected the number to be lower was Andrew Slavitt, who is principal deputy administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and is about to become the acting administrator.
"This is a much more active consumer than anybody expected," Slavitt told The Wall Street Journal's Louise Radnofsky, whose story first reported those numbers. "We wanted to create maximum choice while we had maximum protection."
It was important for people to do that shopping around because the entrance of new insurers into marketplaces in many states meant for cheaper plans in many of them, and that meant a change in the formula for calculating subsidies. That in turn meant some enrollees having a smaller subsidy available for their second year of enrollment. The administration worked hard to get the word out to returning customers, and those efforts seemed to have paid off. But there's also a good chunk of this population—the people who don't get insurance through an employer—who are used to shopping for the best insurance deal.
About four million people, though—half of those who signed up on Healthcare.gov—were using it for the first time, which means a lot of people in flux. They could be changing jobs and losing employer insurance, getting divorced, starting their own businesses, coming off of their parents' insurance at age 27. These are all major life events that were made much more fraught before the Affordable Care Act, before people could make life-changing decisions without having to worry about how they'd continue to have health insurance.
That's just one more thing at stake in the King v. Burwell case the Supreme Court hears next week. It could all go up in a puff of smoke if the Supreme Court decides all of those people who spent time and energy shopping for health insurance on the federal exchange shouldn't have the federal subsidy.