With less than a week until the deadline to buy individual health insurance that begins Jan. 1, experts say sign-ups are on course to hit or exceed the Obama administration’s projection of about 9 million enrollees in 2015.

Several weeks into the second year of the Affordable Care Act’s insurance exchanges, about 1.5 million people have enrolled in coverage, according to data from state and federal exchanges.

As of Dec. 5, almost 1.4 million had enrolled through the federal insurance exchange, which serves 37 states, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services reported Wednesday. Another 183,000 chose plans through state exchanges, including nearly 49,000 in California, according to a Kaiser Health News analysis of state exchange data.  Enrollment figures were not available for exchanges in New York, Idaho and Rhode Island.

“Exchange enrollment is far ahead of 2014’s pace due to improved technology performance,” said Caroline Pearson, vice president of Avalere Health, a consulting firm.

She said sign-ups are on track to “far exceed” the Obama administration’s 9 million projection, made just before open enrollment began in November. If enrollment continues at this pace, she said, the federal and state exchanges should enroll between 4 and 5 million new participants, she said. That’s in addition to 6.7 million who got coverage for 2014, many of whom are expected to re-enroll for 2015.

Enrollment in 2014 plans reached nearly 7 million despite the disastrous rollout of the federal and several state exchanges, which made it difficult if not impossible to sign up in the early months.

Sign-ups for 2015 began Nov. 15 and continue through Feb. 15. However, those who want coverage in January must enroll by Monday.

Some Republicans have argued that enrollment would suffer in the law’s second year because people would be unhappy with their coverage and prices would skyrocket. So far, that does not appear to be happening.

Several state insurance exchanges reporting data appear to be ahead of where they were several weeks into open enrollment last year, including Massachusetts, Maryland and Vermont.

It is not known how many of the enrollees in some state exchanges are new to the market. But on the federal exchange about 48 percent of the people selecting plans are new, while 52 percent had coverage in the marketplace this year, according to CMS.
California officials said it was too early to tell how many of the 1.1 million current enrollees have returned for 2015. In most states, consumers will be automatically re-enrolled in the same plan or one like it if they have not selected a plan by Dec. 15. They can switch before Feb. 15.

“The pace of enrollment is very strong,” Peter Lee, executive director of Covered California, told reporters Wednesday. The state is already on its way to meeting its goal of 750,000 new enrollees this year, Lee said.

He said he expected the momentum to continue, with more than 40 enrollment events planned through Dec. 15.

On the federal exchange, tens of thousands of people have started accounts but not yet selected a plan.

Charles Gaba, a blogger based in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. who accurately forecast 2014 enrollment, predicts that about 12 million Americans will enroll in exchange coverage in 2015.

The Congressional Budget Office had predicted about 13 million sign-ups for 2015, but in November, administration officials estimated about 9 million, in part because fewer employers than expected were dropping coverage and sending their workers to the exchanges. That includes those who re-enroll in coverage as well as new sign-ups.

Similar to last year, the biggest surge in enrollment is expected immediately before the Dec. 15 deadline to have coverage by Jan. 1 and then, right before Feb. 15, which is the final deadline to have coverage in 2015, Gaba said.

Dan Schuyler, senior director of exchange technology at consulting firm Leavitt Partners, said state exchanges are performing much better than they did last year, though there have been minor glitches.

Two state exchanges—Nevada and Oregon, switched to the federal healthcare.gov portal after abandoning their own failed software. Maryland, meanwhile, took software from the Connecticut exchange.

“It seems like state exchanges have turned the corner this year,” Schuyler said.

Jon Kingsdale, who oversaw the Massachusetts health insurance exchange from 2006 to 2010 and is a managing director of the Wakely Consulting Group, said customer call centers are also working better with better-trained staff.

One big challenge facing the exchanges, he said, is how well they “hand off” enrollments to health plans which was a problem in some states last year.

The exchanges also have to make sure automatic re-enrollment works later this month, Schuyler said. Many consumers who are automatically re-enrolled may be shocked to learn their plans have raised rates or changed their benefits, he said.

State and federal officials also have to keep reaching out to consumers. California’s insurance exchange has partnered with hospitals and medical groups to get the word out about the availability of coverage. The agency also stepped up advertisements, including a bilingual campaign featuring people who enrolled last year.

There has also been strong interest in Medi-Cal – California’s version of Medicaid, the state-federal program for low-income people. About 160,000 have applied and three-quarters were enrolled immediately, while the others are still going through the process, said Toby Douglas, director of the state’s Department of Health Care Services.  “It is clear that Californians’ desire for health coverage remains really strong,” he said.

Anna Gorman and Lisa Gillespie contributed to this story.

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

For centuries, the central challenge in health care was ignorance. There simply wasn’t enough information to know what was making a person sick, or what to do to cure the patient.

Now, health care is being flooded with information. Advances in computing technology mean that gathering, storing and analyzing health information is relatively cheap, and it’s getting cheaper by the day. As computers continue to fall in price, the cost of sequencing a single person’s genome is tumbling, too.

Entrepreneur Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong is working on wearable, real-time monitors to give doctors the ability to “interrogate” a person’s individual blood cells “all the way down to the atom level” to see how a given drug works or why it fails.

Information from patients around the globe could then be compared, in theory. Computers could ultimately help doctors match specific treatments at the molecular level to the people for whom they would work best. Software might also detect patterns in data that would suggest new uses for existing drugs.

Collecting biochemical and genomic data on billions of people around the world is just the tip of the data iceberg that a few dozen health information technology experts described recently in New York at a gathering sponsored by Forbes magazine.

“You now have all of health care digitized, which is pretty cool,” said Paul Black, president of the electronic health records company Allscripts.

But it’s still unclear how to make sense of all the digital information on a big-picture scale. “There’s different approaches in the marketplace to how you would make this all be actually valuable to people,” Black said.

Some doctors are finding it valuable to “see the community information, versus just the campus information,” meaning: If they know where their patients are going for health care beyond their hospital or office, and whether they’re actually filling all the prescriptions they’ve been given, doctors make different treatment decisions nearly 70 percent of the time, Black said.

Companies like Castlight Health are betting that they can come up with ways to analyze seemingly unrelated data about how and why people use health care to improve health and save corporations money.

Castlight’s Dr. Dena Bravata said, “We can now actually marry information from [corporate human resources] systems — Are you a high performer in your company? What’s your absenteeism been? — with medical claims to really understand that, among our high performers we’re having a lot of absenteeism because their kids’ asthma is not well controlled.”

There are concerns about privacy and data security. Blackberry CEO John Chen pitched his company’s mobile devices as secure enough to meet federal medical privacy laws. But the Forbes event was more focused on the potential benefits in the new Big Data world.

There’s a lot of optimism that having a more complete picture of peoples’ health and how they use the health care system will save insurance companies money, and drive health care premiums down. Kevin Nazemi, co-CEO of Oscar Insurance, believes that a new generation of wearable wireless sensors will soon help doctors detect health problems early enough to prevent expensive treatments.

But, Nazemi said, it’s still hard for insurance companies to justify investing up front in data systems when “the value is reaped in Year 4 or 5 in a market where [people switch insurance] on average every three years. You know, dollar in, 25 cents back. How do you think of that?”

David Goldhill, who runs a cable TV network and is the author of the book Catastrophic Care, is skeptical that technological breakthroughs, even if they make people healthier, will ever tame health care spending.

“We didn’t go from 4 percent to 17 percent of GDP on health care spending because Americans got a lot less healthy,” he said. “The increase in spending in health care isn’t because, ‘Oh my God, we’re sick and if we can just cure ourselves, it’s going to go away,’ ” he said. “It’s a business model issue, it’s the way we subsidize and manage demand.”

Some see a future when wirelessly enabled skin patches are cheap, common and accumulating personal health data on a massive scale, and all that data leads to better cures and detects health problems before they blossom into expensive diagnoses. Others, an era where every minute abnormality, dangerous or not, is identified and money is spent needlessly treating it.

Yale School of Medicine cardiologist and Shots contributor Harlan Krumholz is optimistic about medicine’s ability to reel in meaningful insights in that vast sea of data. But, he says, it’s going to require a major shift in culture in clinics and hospitals. He says it’s still the norm for doctors to rely on their memories to determine whether a given drug is right for a particular patient, “as if nobody’s walking with a computer on their holster.”

This story is part of a partnership that includes Montana Public Radio, NPR and Kaiser Health News.

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

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