According to the Obama administration, enrollment into the Obamacare program saw more sign-ups on Wednesday than any other day since enrollment started in November first, to the tune of 100,000 people.
“That’s an indication of the intense demand for the kinds of offerings that are available to people at Healthcare.gov," White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said Thursday.
However, some may blame the increase in membership to the fact that President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to make repealing and replacing Obamacare a top priority when he takes the office next year. A tall order, since the Department of Health and Human Services claims over 20 million people have signed up with the program.
Despite this, more Americans view the Affordable Care Act negatively than positively, according to a Gallup taken in September. The reason being is that despite promises that care would be affordable — as its namesake implies — prices have done nothing but go up.
As John Davidson at the Federalist explains, every promise that surrounded the ACA has either fallen short, or the complete reverse happened.
Why are subsidies going up? Because premiums are going up, as they have been doing for years. To be fair, they were going up before Obamacare, but the law has accelerated that growth, not slowed or reversed it, like Obama promised. Last November, when enrollment season began for year three of Obamacare, millions nationwide were hit with sticker shock. Premiums increased dramatically in some places, by 31.5 percent in Alaska and 36 percent in Mississippi, with huge increases also recorded in Minnesota and Arizona and elsewhere. So even though CBO expects 4 million fewer people will be enrolled by 2024 than they first projected, Obamacare subsidies will cost the same: $99 billion.
Like the gun control panic that would occur after shootings, and political speeches that mentioned tighter restrictions during the Obama administration, we may be seeing a similar reaction to the threat of Obamacare being deleted from the books. Encouragement by officials to enroll — like HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell's tweet — may be seen as a last ditch effort to pad enrollee numbers, and make repealing the ACA that much more difficult.
