Health insurer Centene Corp. announced Monday 1.4 million people have signed up for the plans it offers under Obamacare.
“The growth in the exchange has been so dramatic ... We had planned on incremental growth, but not that much,” the company's CEO, Michael Neidorff said, adding, “We’ve had people working all weekend, playing catchup.”
The exchanges allow low- and middle-income people to purchase health insurance that is subsidized by the federal government. Centene is known for its participation in the Medicaid program, which largely covers low-income people. In March of last year, Centene announced it covered 1.2 million people in Obamacare exchange plans.
So far, 8.7 million people have signed up for Obamacare plans on the federal exchange, healthcare.gov. Some customers are still allowed to enroll in plans, and others are in states like California and New York that are still running open enrollment periods.
Centene's totals, as of Jan. 7, were made during a presentation at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco. Centene was one of the few insurers to not only continue offering Obamacare plans but to expand into more states, while companies like Aetna, Humana, and UnitedHealth Group scaled back or exited altogether.
The companies faced uncertainty about the future of Obamacare under a Republican-controlled federal government and, in previous years, had lost millions of dollars from selling these plans.
