Over 153,000 Selected Plans in Week 11

More than 153,600 consumers selected Affordable Care Act health care plans through the Healthcare.gov online marketplace during the 11th week of open enrollment, according to the “weekly snapshot report” issued by the Department of Health and Human Services. Enrollment ends Jan. 31.

The volume for the week of Jan. 10 to Jan. 16 was more than double the 74,200 who selected insurance plans during the 10th week of open enrollment. The total for the 11 weeks was 8.84 million, HHS reported.

“As expected, consumer interest is beginning to increase again as we near the deadline for 2016 coverage,” HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell said.

The Healthcare.gov site had 3.1 million visitors in Week 11, up 50% from the 1.97 million visitors the prior week. The Spanish-language CuidadoDeSalud.gov site had nearly 263,000 visitors, compared to 148,000 the week before.

Nearly 560,600 consumers submitted applications during the week, more than double the 253,000 who applied in the previous week.

More than 730,000 visitors used the “window shopping” feature on Healthcare.gov, along with about 15,000 on CuidadoDeSalud.gov. The comparable figures for the prior week were about 503,000 visitors for Healthcare.gov and 10,000 for CuidadoDeSalud.gov.

For English-speaking consumers, phone calls to the HHS call center totaled over 1.1 million, up from about 830,500 the prior week. The average hold time was eight minutes and 32 seconds, compared one minute and 21 seconds in Week 10.

Calls to Spanish-speaking representatives totaled about 81,300 up from the prior week’s 63,800. Average wait times were about 29 seconds, triple the wait time a week earlier.

Since Open Enrollment began on November 1, HHS noted, 8,836,102 consumers have signed up for health coverage through HealthCare.gov or allowed their coverage to renew automatically. Including dependents, applications have been submitted for over 11.6 million Americans.

Individual plan selections for states using the HealthCare.gov platform include:

HealthCare.gov Local Area Snapshot

*Because there was a change of 11 or fewer enrollments for Week 11, data for Week 10 was used as a placeholder to adhere to privacy standards.