Obamacare Projected Enrollment Could Drop 30 Percent

The Obama administration announced Monday it expects the number of people who will gain health coverage in the next year through the Affordable Care Act’s insurance marketplaces to be significantly fewer than previous government predictions.

Health and Human Services officials said that 9 million to 9.9 million Americans — as much as 30 percent below other estimates— will have insurance by the end of 2015 through fledgling federal and state insurance exchanges intended for people who cannot get affordable coverage through a job.

The figures mark the first time that the administration has made public its view of how popular the marketplaces’ health plans, which began to provide coverage in January, will prove in their second year. They are more pessimistic than estimates last spring by the Congressional Budget Office, which predicted that 13 million people will have health coverage through these insurance exchanges in 2015.

HHS officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that their analysis is based on an appraisal of how quickly people have tended to be drawn to other kinds of public health insurance programs when they were new, combined with predictions of how many people who bought health plans through the exchanges this year will keep them.

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