1.1 Million Fewer Obamacare Enrollments Forecast After Trump Slashes Federal Outreach Advertising By 90%

Joshua Peck writes at Medium:

The Trump administration recently announced that they were cutting the outreach and education budget for Obamacare by 90 percent, from $100 million to $10 million. As the person in charge of how that money was spent last year, I decided to crunch the numbers to figure out what that would mean for enrollment this year.

A minimum of 1.1 million fewer people will enroll in the federal exchange solely because of the administration’s drastic cuts to Open Enrollment outreach. Keep in mind, this is the least harm the administration’s outreach cuts could have — this is a best case scenario. It assumes they spend the $10 million they have budgeted well and that nothing else the administration has done will impact enrollment.

When it comes to estimating the impact of outreach, I am not pulling a number out of the air. The administration falsely asserted that “they had not done any studies of the efficacy of enrollment advertising”. This is absurd. The Department of Health and Human Services closely measured the impact of outreach during previous Open Enrollments so we have a clear understanding of how effective advertising is at driving enrollment.