Officials to target urban areas in ObamaCare’s third enrollment year

The Obama administration is gearing up for what it expects to be the toughest healthcare sign-up season yet, officials said Tuesday.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will target a total of 10.5 million people who are eligible for marketplace coverage but remain uninsured, Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell said Tuesday. Of that population, many are young, poor and from a minority background, according to the new data from the department.

{mosads}“Overall, this open enrollment is going to be tougher than last year,” she told a crowd of medical students at Howard University Hospital. “But while our goals may be harder to reach, we’re working smarter to reach them.”

Burwell said the government’s outreach would focus specifically on five urban areas — Dallas, Houston, northern New Jersey, Chicago and Miami — that have the most uninsured people who qualify for marketplace coverage.

This year’s sign-up period will require health officials to go deeper into hard-to-reach communities — and with a smaller budget. HHS is planning to spend less this year on enrollment activities, a senior official said Tuesday, though he did not provide dollar amounts.

Officials believe they’ll get some new customers who are turned off by the fee for not having insurance, which increases to at least $325 per person next year. 

HHS officials said while they will have a goal for the upcoming enrollment season, they are not ready to release it.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicted earlier this year that 21 million people would have insurance through the marketplace by 2016. That outcome is unlikely, however, because marketplace enrollment would have to more than double.

The administration initially reported that 11.7 million people had gained insurance during the last enrollment season, though Burwell lowered that figure to 9.1 million on Tuesday.

The biggest hurdle will be convincing people who have low incomes and small savings accounts to sign up for healthcare, Burwell said, citing an independent study that found half of uninsured people have less than $100 in savings.

The new HHS data confirmed the challenge: 40 percent of the uninsured are living at or near the poverty line.  Additionally, about one-third of people are Hispanic, black or Asian, and half are between the ages of 18 and 34 — all demographics that have been historically difficult to reach.

Still, these figures leave out millions of people who are not eligible for marketplace coverage either because their income doesn’t qualify for subsidies or because they do not reside legally in the country. “That’s obviously considerably smaller than the overall uninsured population,” a senior HHS official said Tuesday.

He added that it’s a shift in strategy that will help HHS continue to be aggressive on outreach while facing dwindling budgets.

Burwell will also rely on strategies that have been tested during the previous two years of enrollment, which helped 17.6 million people gain coverage — another new figure she released Tuesday.

“We’ve done extensive analyses about what’s worked better and what’s worked less well over the last two years,” the senior HHS official said. “[Burwell] is now able to target her travel in ways she wasn’t able two years ago.”