Chart of the Day: Obamacare Enrollments Likely to End Lower Than Last Year

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Here’s my latest estimate of Obamacare signups through the end of last week:

Signups on the federal exchange are 19 percent ahead of last year, so I’m projecting that total signups are also 19 percent ahead.

Friday is the last day to enroll on the federal exchange, so this week should be a strong one. I expect that we’ll end up around 6 million signups plus another 1-2 million auto-renewals on HC.gov. At a guess, that means total signups will be in the range of 10-11 million once all the state exchanges have reported in. That would be down from 12 million last year.

Some of this might be due to an increase in folks who are above the income cutoff for subsidies and can actually get a better deal off-exchange than they can via Obamacare (due to the intricacies of the CSR elimination). But most of it is probably just a reminder that sabotage works. Confusion, lack of outreach, and an arbitrarily short enrollment period have done their intended job.