Dive Brief:
- About 1.6 million marketplace health plan enrollees for 2016 dropped out of their plan by late March, according to federal data released last week.
- The HHS report found that 12.7 million people initially enrolled in ACA health plans for this year, but just 11.1 million people remained enrolled--a drop of almost 13%.
- The enrollees were considered dropouts because they never began paying their plan premiums.
Dive Insight:
A similar pattern has been noted each year since consumers began buying marketplace plans for coverage in 2014. What stood out about 2016 was that the Obama administration had been attempting to prevent such a loss of customers by following up on targeted applications during the open enrollment process.
"The drop off is maybe a tad higher than expected, given that they dropped people as they went along," Larry Levitt, senior vice president for special initiatives at the Kaiser Family Foundation, told the Associated Press. "But it's in the range of reasonable results."
The retention rate of 87% aligns with its goal of maintaining about 10 million enrollees by the end of this year, according to the administration. Some of the dropouts are presumed to have moved to a different form of coverage.
While the HHS highlights that the loss of enrollees is within expectations, the dropouts add fuel to the debate over the stability of the ACA.