WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama's top health official announced that the new health insurance marketplaces have seen a 25 percent increase in the number of insurers planning to sell coverage in the 2015 enrollment period, which administration officials cited as a sign of the private market's confidence in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell announced the figure during a speech at the Brookings Institution, where she said the Affordable Care Act is succeeding based on key metrics nearly one year into the law's coverage expansion.
"When you consider the law through the lens of affordability, access and quality, the evidence points to a clear conclusion: tThe Affordable Care Act is working," said Burwell, who made just her second speech since winning confirmation to the post in June.
Participation in the 36 states using the federal enrollment website, healthcare.gov, is expected to increase from a combined 191 insurers in the 2014 enrollment period to 248 in 2015, according to a Health and Human Services report issued Tuesday. Eight states running their own marketplaces will see insurer participation increase from 61 last year to 67 in 2015.
The department did not have data for state-run marketplaces in Hawaii, Kentucky, Minnesota, Massachusetts and Vermont. Nor did it report insurer participation for Nevada and Oregon, which are planning to join healthcare.gov after experiencing severe technical problems with their state-run insurance exchanges.
Consumers in some states with especially limited choices in 2014 will see increased competition during the next enrollment period, according to the Health and Human Services report. The number of insurers in New Hampshire's health insurance marketplace will increase from one to five in 2015.
When the 2015 enrollment period begins in November, 77 issuers plan to offer marketplace coverage for the first time or in states that they haven't participated in yet, the report said. That includes some major players like United Health Group, the nation's largest insurer, which will participate in about two dozen exchanges in 2015 after selling in just five this year.
According to the Health and Human Services report, 13 insurers that offered exchange plans in state and federal marketplaces this year are planning to drop out in 2015. That figure does not include last week's withdrawal of the largest insurer in Minnesota's state-run marketplace.
However, the department still hasn't finalized contracts with insurers to sell in the insurance marketplaces, meaning some could still pull out. Senior Health and Human Services officials could not say when they will have a final insurer count for the 2015 enrollment period, nor did they provide details about plan pricing or whether insurers plan to sell statewide or in just certain areas.
The administration last week announced that 7.3 million people as of mid-August were enrolled in marketplace coverage, which was down from the 8 million people who signed up at the end of open enrollment in April.
That figure doesn't indicate how many people stopped paying their premiums, signed up for other coverage or obtained new marketplace coverage through a special enrollment period. Senior Health and Human Services officials said they plan to update the marketplace enrollment figures before the start of the next enrollment period.
Burwell said Wednesday that officials also are reassessing the number of people they expect to sign up this year.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which analyzes the effects of federal legislation, has estimated that 13 million people should be in the market in 2015. But Burwell suggested that number may not be the right target.
"One of things we are doing right now is applying analytics to how should we think about that goal," she said.
She declined to say when a new target might be announced, saying the administration is consulting with insurance industry officials and market analysts to gauge the performance of a new market like that created by the health law.
The report came shortly after the independent Health and Human Services inspector general's office released a report on Tuesday finding one "critical vulnerability" in healthcare.gov security when it tried breaking into the site in the same way a hacker might. However, the federal watchdog said the site's security features detected and defended against the simulated cyberattack.
Burwell said improving the enrollment website's security, as well as making it easier for consumers to shop for health plans this year, ranks among her top priorities.
Information for this article was contributed by Jason Millman of The Washington Post and by Noam N. Levey of the Tribune Washington Bureau.
A Section on 09/25/2014