Ask House Speaker Paul Ryan about the state of Obamacare and he has a ready response. “It’s in a death spiral,” he said Thursday at his weekly press conference. It’s a scary term, one that carries significant weight as the Ryan-led House Republicans prepare to take the first step towards repealing and replacing the law.

But there’s one problem: Obamacare isn’t in a death spiral—at least not yet.

It might sound like a dire rhetorical flourish, but to health care experts, “death spiral” has a very specific meaning: It’s what happens when premiums rise so much that young and healthy enrollees drop coverage in large numbers. When that happens, the overall mix of insured people—known as the “risk pool”—tilts toward sicker and older people. This boosts the overall cost per person, forcing insurers to raise premiums again—which causes the remaining young and healthy enrollees to drop their coverage. That pattern repeats itself until the insurance market collapses entirely, with no one able to afford insurance. It’s a worst-case scenario for any health care reform, and avoiding it is why the White House has been so determined to get young and healthy people to sign up.

Republicans have long warned that Obamacare would inevitably end in a death spiral in the markets for individual insurance policies, while Democrats considered such concerns overblown. After insurers’ costs rose dramatically last year, they raised premiums accordingly—around 20 percent on average for benchmark plans—and some dropped out of the market altogether. In turn, Republicans began claiming that their warnings were proving correct. The death spiral was beginning, they said.

Yet the recent enrollment figures don’t back up those claims. Last week, the Department of Health and Human Services released its first full enrollment report for 2017. As of December 24, about 11.5 million individuals had signed up for an ACA plan either on the Obamacare exchange or on the 11 state exchanges, a slight increase over the same period last year.

“If enrollment isn’t declining, then by definition the market can’t be spiraling out of control,” said Larry Levitt, a health care expert at the Kaiser Family Foundation.

There was a slight drop in the proportion of younger enrollees: Of the people buying insurance on the exchanges, 26 percent were between the ages of 18 and 34, down from last year’s figure of 28 percent. Both figures are far below the Obama administration’s original goal of 40 percent—an overestimate that explains, in part, why premiums have risen so much in the first place. That’s a significant concern among health care experts, leading the law’s supporters to call for higher subsidies to help people afford their premiums, and insurers to call for stronger enforcement of the rules around buying policies—so, for example, people can't simply purchase coverage when they get sick.

Some Obamacare critics think that the stats are actually hiding a much less healthy system. Grace-Marie Turner, the president of the Galen Institute, suspects that Obamacare may already be in a death spiral, even though the enrollment figures ticked up. She hypothesized that the uptick was the result of people rushing to buy coverage before Republicans repealed and replaced the law—what she calls “a repeal spurt in enrollment." It’s impossible to know for sure whether that’s driving the enrollment numbers, and given the GOP’s intent to repeal the law, we may never find out. Regardless, the fact is that those people are still purchasing insurance and keeping the insurance markets afloat.

The enrollment window lasts until the end of January, so these figures will change; weak enrollment over the final five weeks could change the outlook somewhat. And they don’t include people in the individual market who purchase insurance outside of the Obamacare exchanges, even though those people are part of the same insurance risk pools as those who buy through the exchanges; significant declines in off-exchange purchases could be another sign that a death spiral is beginning. Anecdotal reports don’t indicate that such a decline is occurring, but right now it’s tough to know for sure.

It’s also possible the smaller “death spirals” could start locally, even in a system that’s broadly still working. Each state and territory has its own risk pool, so it’s possible for individual state markets to approach collapse while overall enrollment grows. At the very local level, this has started to happen; there are now counties where people have just one insurance plan to choose. But most counties continue to have multiple insurers, and enrollment overall hasn’t collapsed.

“There are some states where enrollment is dropping,” said Levitt, “but not the kind of precipitous declines you’d expect to see in a death spiral.”

Even if Obamacare isn’t experiencing a death spiral, that doesn’t mean the law doesn’t have problems. As POLITICO reported last summer, insurers really did face huge costs last year, and the premium hikes were necessary for them to stay solvent. Many insurance plans have huge deductibles that make them near useless for low-income Americans.

Critics also point out that Obamacare is built to prop up enrollment by subsidizing premiums for poorer people, a job that could become more expensive as premiums rise. “As the Obama administration has gleefully pointed out, even though the premiums went up very, very high in most places, that didn’t affect the very low income people who got subsides because the subsidies just went up,” said Joseph Antos, a health care expert at the American Enterprise Institute. “Well, great. As long as no one takes any action, you can do that forever. Eventually, even taxpayers will figure out that this is a really bad deal.”

Despite those real challenges, the law’s critics, including Ryan, are getting ahead of themselves in saying the law has entered a death spiral. In some ways, in fact, the law is moving in the opposite direction: S&P, for instance, projected smaller losses for insurers in 2017 than in 2016, potentially portending smaller premium hikes.

At this point, it’s hard to know what happens next: The Republicans’ day-to-day arguments over how to repeal and replace the health care law are leaving the entire industry in suspense over what it will even look like in a few years. But if it holds true, then far from entering a death spiral, Obamacare could actually be stabilizing—just as Congress starts the process of taking it apart.

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