ObamaCare racks up more than 600,000 signups in its first four days

The GOP has been trying to take down ObamaCare from the start. But new numbers show the Affordable Care Act is far from dead.

More than 600,000 people signed up for health-care plans in the first four days of HealthCare.gov's open enrollment, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced Thursday. Nearly a quarter of those signups came from new enrollees.

That far outpaces last year's signups, CNBC noted. In 2016, it took 12 days for enrollment to reach 1,008,281 signups.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

A direct comparison isn't the best way of analyzing the data from both years, as the CMS only released stats from the first 12 days of 2016 signups. But CNBC pointed out that in 2017, ObamaCare has seen an average of 150,266 signups per day. In 2016, the average was only 84,018 signups per day.

These numbers only stem from the 39 states that use HealthCare.gov, which means they don't include big markets such as California and New York. Additionally, it's hard to predict how much ObamaCare signups may slow after this first week of open enrollment.