Trump’s Next Chance to Wreck Obamacare: Open Enrollment

At the Coastal Carolina Fair outside Charleston, South Carolina, you can visit a haunted house, touch a llama at the petting zoo, and, until this year, sign up for health coverage under the Affordable Care Act. Over the past four years, workers from the nonprofit Palmetto Project sometimes stayed at the fairgrounds until midnight to help people enroll, but they won’t be there when the fair opens Thursday. The Trump administration cut the group’s $1 million federal grant in half, part of a broader push by the White House to weaken promotion for the marketplaces.

The four-year-old Obamacare marketplaces will face their toughest year yet when the window to buy coverage opens on Nov. 1. Already, even before enrollment starts, President Donald Trump has halted payments to insurers that reimburse them for reducing out-of-pocket costs for low-income people. This means that those who turn up seeking health coverage—despite the steep cuts to outreach and marketing and an abbreviated enrollment period—will face even higher premiums. The combination is likely to depress the number of people who purchase health plans, although no one can predict by how much.