The CBO projects that the number of enrollees in the ACA’s subsidized exchanges will climb until 2018, at which point large numbers of young, healthy individuals will choose to leave the exchanges rather than bear the rising cost of premiums. As Jed Graham explains, this decline reflects a quirk of the law inserted to reduce projected spending:
The exchanges’ declining future is largely tied to a little-understood last-minute cost-control inserted to make ObamaCare seem more fiscally responsible. It kicks in after 2018 if exchange subsidies top 0.5% of GDP — as CBO estimates show they surely will.
One way or another, the ACA will have to be replaced, or reformed so thoroughly that it will be replaced in all but name.