(Bloomberg) — About 8.3 million people have signed up for health coverage through the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act's U.S.-run shopping markets this year, the U.S. said Tuesday, surpassing last year's total and signaling good news for hospital and health insurance companies.
At about the same point in the enrollment period last year, 6.4 million people had signed up.
The report counts enrollees for 2016 coverage as of Dec. 19 in 38 states that use the PPACA federal marketplace, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said.
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It's the most comprehensive accounting since a Dec. 17 deadline for people to pick coverage that begins at the start of 2016.
Sign-ups this year are an important indication of how President Barack Obama's health care overhaul is faring ahead of the 2016 presidential election.
They're also a bellwether for hospital and health insurance stocks–investors are closely tracking the figures to see how many new paying customers those businesses can expect.
The U.S. has said that about 9.9 million people will probably be enrolled in PPACA plans by the end of 2016, compared with a projected 9.1 million at the close of 2015.
That modest gain has disappointed some investors and contributed to a slump this year in hospital chains such as Tenet Healthcare Corp. and Community Health Systems Inc.
While sign-ups for 2016 coverage are running ahead of last year's total, the figures aren't directly comparable.
Last year's sign-up period began two weeks later, and an additional state, Hawaii, is using the federal exchange this year.
The figure updates a tally from last week, when the U.S. said that about 6 million people had signed up for individual health plans as of the Dec. 17 deadline, compared with 3.4 million in 2014. Those figures didn't include people whose coverage was automatically renewed, who are in the new total.
The 2016 enrollment figure will continue to grow.
People can still sign up for coverage that begins later in the year, and the data don't include enrollment from states like New York and California, which run their own health-insurance marketplaces.
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