Trump Administration Cuts Obamacare Enrollment Advertising By 90 Percent, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That Uninsured Americans Could Still Find Out How To Get Covered

WASHINGTON. The Department of Health and Human Services announced Thursday that it would cut federal spending on advertising for the Affordable Care Act's upcoming open enrollment period by roughly 90 percent, reducing the budget from about $100 million to roughly $10 million, while trimming grants to the in-person "navigators" who help people sign up by an additional 40 percent, resolving a long-standing concern that Americans who did not already know how to obtain health insurance might still accidentally obtain it.

Department officials characterized the reductions as a matter of simple efficiency, noting that the public had already heard of the law and therefore no longer needed to be told when, where, or how to enroll in it. The shortened enrollment window, they added, would be communicated to the nation through the established channel of people finding out on their own.

The announcement arrived only weeks after the Senate's effort to repeal the law collapsed by a single vote, prompting the administration to shift its approach from dismantling the Affordable Care Act through legislation to allowing it to deteriorate on its own schedule, a process officials agreed could be meaningfully accelerated. "As I said from the beginning, let Obamacare fail," the President had explained that summer, outlining a health care vision in which the federal government's role was to step back and permit a law covering twenty million people to encounter difficulty.

"Outreach is one of those things where you can spend a hundred million dollars, or you can spend ten million dollars and find out who really wants it," said one senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity. "If a family loses track of the deadline, misses the window, and goes uninsured for the year, that is information. We are letting the market teach."

Policy analysts noted that enrollment advertising had historically been most useful for reaching younger and healthier customers, precisely the people whose participation keeps premiums lower for everyone else, meaning the cut was structured to weaken the law in the manner most likely to be cited later as proof the law was weak. The savings to the Treasury, roughly ninety million dollars, were described as the smallest portion of the transaction.

At press time, the department confirmed that anyone still hoping to enroll was welcome to do so during the newly shortened window, on a website it would not be mentioning, by a deadline it had decided against publicizing.