"There are so many little reasons that somebody might be hesitating, and when you put them all together, you end up with at least a few million people who are leaving these benefits on the table," Norris says.
Some new people have been signing up on HealthCare.gov and the state marketplaces. The Biden-Harris administration's last report showed 2 million new people enrolled in health plans, although it's not clear how many of them enrolled in one of these free plan options.
Even with these affordable options, years of slashed budgets for outreach under the Trump administration had an impact on how many people are aware of the insurance marketplace at all, says Katie Roders Turner, a navigator with the Family Healthcare Foundation in central Florida.
"Over the last four years, there was this vacuum of information — and misinformation in addition to that," she says. "I think it's a knowledge gap, and I think that a marketing response is really going to make a big difference."
The Biden administration has been putting some effort into marketing the plans and trying to get the word out about the fact that enrollment is now open and there are new discounts available. It's running digital and TV ads and publishing community toolkits.
The Kaiser Family Foundation's Cox says that outreach is needed, not just to tell people the plans are there and they're more affordable now, but also to explain the value of having health insurance, even if it's not a top-tier plan.
"One-hundred percent of the time, if you can get a free bronze plan, you are better off than being uninsured," she says. Some consumers are put off by high deductibles — the amount you would have to pay for any health care you use before your insurance plan picks up the tab. But even a high deductible plan is better than no coverage, she says.
"If you get hit by a bus or have COVID and need a hospitalization, that's the difference between being $7,000 in debt versus being $50,000 in debt," she says. "It can mean the difference between keeping your car or not, or keeping your house or not," she adds. "That's a big difference."
As of Sunday, one of the people who has a free plan is Deborah Kagan. She just moved from New York state — where she was on Medicaid after being laid off during the pandemic — to Florida, where she's not eligible for Medicaid. She was extremely stressed about the move and losing coverage, especially because she has Type 1 diabetes.