These 2 Jaw-Dropping Statistics May Change Your Tune About Obamacare

"These two statistics could change everything

However, two key statistics from the week-seven update issued by CMS suggest that Obamacare may be a lot healthier heading into 2016 than some pundits have recently opined.

1. HealthCare.gov's enrollment data is crushing last year's figures thus far
First, we have the overall enrollment data through the "auto renewal and January coverage deadline" period. Between Dec. 13, 2015 and Dec. 19, 2015, nearly 4.1 million people selected a plan. All told, 78% of these enrollees were consumers who renewed their coverage ahead of the January coverage deadline. The flood opf enrollees practically doubled the cumulative enrollment of the prior six weeks to 8,250,276 through Dec. 19, 2015.


Data source: Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Now here's the interesting thing: Automatic renewals were still not completely accounted for at the time of the CMS data release. A vast majority of them do appear to be accounted for, but it's not out of the question that we could still see a minor jump in enrollment data based on automatic renewals within HealthCare.gov. Some of the dozen states operating their own exchanges have even later January enrollment deadlines, meaning renewals could pour in for those states as well. However, for the figures above, we're strictly looking at enrollment data for the 38 states operating under HealthCare.gov.

Furthermore, at the end of last year's auto renewal and January coverage deadline week, "only" 6.39 million people had selected a plan. This year, we're already up to 8.25 million. To be fair, consumers have had an extra 15 days to shop for health insurance this year, with open enrollment having begun on Nov. 1 for calendar year 2016 as opposed to Nov. 15 for calendar year 2015. But enrollment this year ends on Jan. 31, 2016, whereas last year consumers could shop until mid-February. In any case, enrollment appears to be pacing well ahead of last year, and this could imply that either consumers are eager to be insured or higher shared-responsibility payments are doing the trick. Either way, higher enrollment usually bodes well for insurers.

2. Plan selections for younger adults have soared
Arguably, the bigger news came from a same-day but separate press release from the CMS showing that enrollment for young adults (those below the age of 35) had almost doubled prior to the January coverage deadline this year as compared to last year."