Nov. 20 (UPI) -- Enrollment in Affordable Care Act insurance plans for 2020 remains sluggish, even after early technical glitches with the healthcare.gov web site have been resolved.
In its "week 3" enrollment snapshot, released Wednesday, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced that more than 737,000 consumers selected a plan between Nov. 10 and 16 in the 38 states that use the federal health exchange, down from the nearly 755,000 who enrolled during the previous week. Of these, more than 186,000 were new users to the exchange.
Through the first three weeks of the "open enrollment" period, which ends Dec. 15, nearly 1.7 million users have selected a plan for next year. That's down from the more than 1.9 million people had selected plans through the third week of open enrollment in 2018.
However, CMS measures weeks from Sunday through Saturday, and the first week of open enrollment was thus one day shorter this year. Also, 39 states used the healthcare exchanges for 2019, one more than for 2020.
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So far, according to CMS figures, more than 400,000 new consumers have selected coverage for 2020, while nearly 1.3 million have renewed their 2019 coverage for next year.
Among the 38 states using the federal exchange during this open enrollment period, Florida and Texas led with more than 463,000 and more than 229,000 plans selected, respectively. North Dakota has the fewest with 3,260.
Users reported problems accessing healthcare.gov on the first day of open enrollment -- Nov. 1 -- this year, though CMS said the issues were quickly resolved. No other outages have been reported during the current period.
