Open enrollment for the Affordable Care Act opens on November 15, and the Obama administration has been
field-testing Healthcare.gov to avoid the kind of problems they had last year. What the administration is not doing, however, is predicting how many new enrollments they're expecting this year.
That's largely because most of the easy-to-get people were signed up last year—those who were already looped into the debate and who were most in need of coverage. The next group of enrollees will be harder to reach, which is confirmed by the latest health tracking poll from Kaiser Family Foundation.
The survey finds nine in ten (89 percent) of the uninsured are unaware that open enrollment begins in November—including, 76 percent who say they do not know when open enrollment begins and another 13 percent who name a start date other than November 2014.
In addition, two-thirds of the uninsured say they know “only a little” or “nothing at all” about the marketplaces where people who don’t get coverage through their employers can shop for insurance and just over half (53 percent) of the uninsured are unaware of the financial assistance available to help low- and moderate-income individuals purchase insurance.
That's an awful lot of people completely out of the loop. At the same time, though, 59 percent of the uninsured say they intend to get coverage in the next few months, either through an employer (15 percent) or on their own (another 15 percent). More than a fifth don't know where they'll be getting it. Additionally, most of those who say they will remain uninsured because they won't be able to afford to buy insurance. So the biggest nut for the administration to crack here is reaching these people with the message that most of them can get subsidies to purchase insurance if they use an exchange.
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As always, most of what the public has heard about Obamacare has been the political fight and the bad stuff, not the success stories. And any of the good news now is likely to be drowned out by campaign ads. But open enrollment lasts until February 15, so there's time for the administration and the states that are actually proactively working to cut the uninsured rate to get the word out.
