ObamaCare must double enrollment in only 4 months to stay on target


If the Obama administration wants to keep its health insurance program on track with Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates for enrollment, it will need to more than double the number of people purchasing insurance through the ObamaCare exchanges in just four months.
As of June, the 2015 enrollment total was about 10 million (counting enrollees who actually paid their premiums), 2 million people less than the nonpartisan CBO's goal of 12 million. For 2016, the CBO is aiming for 21 million enrollees to meet its budget projection. The 11 million enrollments it will take to meet that figure must by and large occur in the enrollment period that ends in January, allowing just over four months to reach the goal.
The administration itself is setting lower goals for the program that be more easily met, like 9.1 million enrollees for 2015.
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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