NJ’s Obamacare enrollment: 35000 obtain coverage – The Star-Ledger – NJ.com

Nearly 2.2 milllion Americans enrolled in private health insurance through the federal marketplace by the close of last year – with roughly 35,000 of them from New Jersey.

Additionally, another 71,000 New Jerseyans were deemed eligible for Medicaid.

The monthly update provided by Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius on Monday showed the troubled healthcare.gov website finally gained traction in December.

However, both New Jersey and the country as a whole have a long way to go between now and the March 31 deadline for Americans to have health insurance, health care experts warned.

“It’s a lower number that I would expect – but not surprising given all the problems with healthcare.gov,” said Joel Cantor, director of the Center for State Health Policy and Professor of Public Policy at Rutgers University.

One bright light, said Cantor, was Medicaid: 71,000 New Jersey applicants on the website were eligible for insurance under Medicaid, whose income guidelines have been loosened to cover more people.

He saw that as an impressive dent in the 300,000 uninsured New Jerseyans who earn so little they now qualify for Medicaid. “This is a good down-payment on that,” he said.

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But a problematic area remains the enrollment of the “young invincibles,” those young adults who don’t feel any need to buy health insurance. Without sufficient young, healthy people paying premiums, no insurance pool can afford to cover the sickly.

Nationally, just 24 percent of the enrollees have been in the 18-34 age bracket, even though that group accounts for roughly a third of the uninsured. New Jersey’s number is slightly lower, at 23 percent.

Adults 45 and over have been the quickest to buy insurance through the federal marketplace, accounting for 55 percent of the enrollees. That number is slightly higher – 58 percent – in New Jersey.

“We’re going better,’”said David Knowlton of the New Jersey Health Care Quality Institute, of the enrollment process. “But the big question is, ‘Where are the young invincibles?’”

Obama administration officials said they were pleased with the number of young people enrolling, noting it matched the experience of Massachusetts when that state mandated health insurance. The younger applicants were the last to sign up there, and federal officials expect the same thing will happen with Obamacare.

Until they sign up, however, the risk remains they’ll simply choose to pay the fine to remain uninsured.

“That’s still a concern,” said Jeff Brown, of the New Jersey Health Care Quality Institute.

One pleasant surprise to health care experts is that 60 percent of enrollees around the country chose a so-called “Silver” plan – a middle-tier plan that costs more than a “Bronze” plan but has lower out-of-pocket expenses.

While younger, healthier applicants might be tempted by the lower premiums of a Bronze plan, they could be in for an unpleasant surprise should they get a serious illness, said Cantor.

“That number’s a little reassuring, because if more people picked a Bronze plan, then we would see a large portion of people getting into financial trouble because of health costs,” he said.

Knowlton said he doubted people were pouring over insurance plans, then picking a plan by balancing premiums versus coverage. Instead, he said, they were behaving more like typical consumers of any product. “It’s like how people pick wine,” he said. “They go to the middle of the menu.”

Meanwhile, New Jersey’s Medicaid program, New Jersey FamilyCare, reported the glitches that have stymied the transfer of enrollment data from the federal website have been fixed. As of late last week, the state was finally receiving “workable information” from the federal website and was processing those applications, said Nicole Brossoie, spokeswoman for the New Jersey Department of Human Services.

Anyone ruled eligible will have their coverage backdated to Jan. 1.

In the meantime, hospitals and federally qualified health centers will assume someone who has applied for Medicaid is eligible, and an interim application will be taken so the provider can be reimbursed.

Some of the update’s highlights:

• The administration continues to play catch-up. Originally, officials hoped to sign up more than 3.3 million people through the end of 2013, nearly halfway to the goal of 7 million enrollments by the end of March. Instead, enrollment as of Dec. 31 was not quite 2.2 million.

• Fifty-four percent of those who signed up were women, a slightly higher proportion of females than in the population.

• Nearly four out of five who signed up got financial help with their premiums.

• A few states accounted for a huge share of the enrollment. California alone had 23 percent of the signups. That state, along with New York, Florida, Texas and North Carolina accounted for nearly half the total.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.