The latest Obamacare enrollment figures are out. Things were better in November than October, but they were still bad.
But that doesn’t tell us much that is new.
The key will be December enrollment figures, which will benefit from HealthCare.gov finally being more or less fixed and the projected surge in enrollments ahead of the Dec. 23 deadline to sign up for coverage that begins Jan. 1.
The takeaway from the new numbers is that, yes, the botched HealthCare.gov launch decimated enrollment projections for October and November and has made it very difficult to hit the original Jan. 1 enrollment target of 3.3 million. That means some people will be needlessly without insurance come Jan. 1. The hope is that all of those people will still go ahead and enroll before the open enrollment period closes at the end of March. The administration says it remains confident it can hit its target of 7 million enrollees by then.
So bad news — and frustrating confirmation of the effects of the launch failures — but it’s the same bad news we’ve known about for a while now.
