Administration expects little progress on Obamacare enrollment

By Paige Winfield Cunningham, Paige Winfield Cunningham

Published December 20, 2015

Millions of Americans remain uninsured, yet the Obama administration expects to make virtually no progress this season toward enrolling more of them in Obamacare health plans, according to estimates released Thursday.

Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell is pegging the sign-up goal for the third year of Obamacare enrollment at a modest 10 million people, only slightly higher than the 9.9 million who paid for plans last year and less than a million above last year's expectations.

That's also well below the most recent projection by the Congressional Budget Office, which estimated that in 2016, 20 million Americans would have coverage through private plans sold in the insurance marketplaces set up under the Affordable Care Act.

"I'm going to write a blog post and the title will be 'Has the Obama administration given up on Obamacare?'" said Bob Laszewski, a consultant at Health Policy and Strategy Associates.

"In 2013, had I said to the world that Obamacare is only going to enroll half of the estimated people, what do you think Obama would have said?" he added.