While the Affordable Care Act’s fifth open enrollment season isoff to a surprisingly good start, many uninsured peoplesaid they weren’t even aware of it, according to a survey released Friday.

Nearly a third of people overall — including a third of peoplewithout health insurance — said they had not heard anything about the sign-up periodfor individuals who buy health plans on their own, according to thesurvey by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF). (Kaiser Health Newsis an editorially independent program of the foundation.)

Open enrollment started Nov. 1 and runs through Dec. 15 in moststates. Advocates fear enrollment will decline this year becausePresident Donald Trump has been repeatedly saying the health law is“dead,” and his administration severely cut funding for publicity andin-person assistance.

Nonetheless, nearly 1.5 million people have enrolled on the federal healthinsurance exchange healthcare.gov, which handles coverage in 39states, federal officials reported Wednesday.

One factor that could be pushing more people to sign up earlierthis year is the open enrollment season was cut in half from threemonths to 45 days for the states relying on the federal exchange.Some state exchanges allow enrollment into January.

Several state health insurance exchanges have also said earlysign ups are running higher than last year. The Colorado insuranceexchange on Thursday said it has enrolled more than 22,000 peoplein the first two weeks — a 33 percent jump from last year’s firstweeks.

In the previous open-enrollment season, 12.2million people nationwide selected individual market plansthrough the marketplaces. The number dropped off during the yearbecause not everyone paid and some found coverage elsewhere.

Forty-five percent of all respondents to the KFF survey and 52percent who said they were uninsured said they have heard lessabout open enrollment this year compared to previous years.

Insurers are trying to pick up some of the challenges ofpublicizing enrollment, and some of those ads are gettingnoticed.

The percentage of survey respondents who said they saw adsattempting to sell health insurance increased from 34 percent to 41percent between the October and November KFF tracking polls. Theshare who say they saw ads that provided information about how toget health insurance under the ACA increased from 20 percent to 32percent.

The poll found that nearly 8 in 10 Americans were aware theAffordable Care Act was still in effect.

The survey of 1,201 adults, which was conducted Nov. 8-13, has amargin of error +/-3 percent.

Kaiser HealthNews (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is aneditorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.