January provided a roller-coaster timetable for consumers: They could sign up for subsidized health insurance through the 31st, if they were eligible.
Yet a new president took office Jan. 20, and one of his first actions was to sign an executive order aimed at withdrawing support of the Affordable Care Act.
There is usually a surge of about 700,000 people signing up on the federal Obamacare website, healthcare.gov, at the last minute. This year, however, that number was cut nearly in half, to 375,000.That meant an overall drop in the number of Americans who now purchase their policies through the federal marketplace.
Nationally, roughly 12.2 million signed up for Obamacare in 2017, versus 12.7 million in 2016 through the federal marketplace and state-run exchanges.
In New Jersey, though, the situation was markedly different.
The pace of new enrollments dropped once Trump took office, but by the close of the open enrollment window, 295,067 New Jersey residents had acquired insurance through the federal marketplace.
That’s a about a two percent increase over last year’s enrollment of 288,573.
https://www.nj.com/healthfit/index.ssf/2017/02/obamacare_sign-ups_tank_-_but_not_in_new_jersey.html