Obamacare deadline extended as almost 2 million use site

WASHINGTON – Consumers waiting until the last minute to buy health coverage under Obamacare received a reprieve as a record number of users visited the federal online insurance marketplace.

The deadline to enroll in health plans that begin Jan. 1 was extended to midnight today from yesterday for most of the U.S., the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services said. The extension was announced as HealthCare.gov yesterday saw almost 2 million visitors, a single-day record,and consumers were moved into a queuing system deployed when the website approaches 50,000 simultaneous users.

The state deadline in Rhode Island for people to enroll through HealthSource RI had been previously extended to Dec. 31 for coverage beginning Jan. 1.

President Barack Obama has struggled to carry out the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the biggest overhaul of the U.S. health-care system since the 1960s. The law has been hamstrung by delays, website outages and political backlash. The late changes probably are necessary to smooth the transition to the new insurance system in January, said Henry Aaron, a health economist at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

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“That kind of willingness to do things manually, do whatever it takes to be done to make sure people do not get disappointed at key dates, is absolutely critical right now and there are indications that the feds are belatedly figuring that out,” Aaron said in a phone interview.

Insurers had agreed to begin coverage at the start of 2014 for people who selected policies by the deadline as long as they send their first payments by Jan. 10. With the enrollment extension, people who buy plans from tomorrow through Jan. 15 will get coverage Feb. 1. The last deadline to sign up for a health plan in 2014 remains March 31.

Final decisions

“We recognize that many have chosen to make their final decisions on today’s deadline and we are committed to making sure they can do so,” said Julie Bataille, a CMS spokeswoman.

While acceding to some of the late changes requested by the administration, insurers have resisted other concessions such as retroactive enrollment and out-of-network coverage. The enrollment extension was another irritant to the industry.

“Health plans will continue to do everything they can to help consumers through the enrollment process and mitigate potential confusion or disruption caused by all of these last-minute changes to the rules and deadlines,” Robert Zirkelbach, a spokesman for America’s Health Insurance Plans, the industry’s Washington lobby group, said in an email.

While enrollment had been sluggish from the Oct. 1 introduction of the marketplaces through November, sign-ups accelerated in December, Obama said at a Dec. 20 news conference. More than 500,000 people in the 36 states served by the federal exchange selected plans in the first three weeks of the month, the president said.

Obama’s enrollment

Obama’s staff, in a symbolic move, signed the president up for a health-care plan this past weekend through the District of Columbia exchange, said Eric Schultz, a White House spokesman. While the president receives his health care from the military, he enrolled “as a show of support” for the new marketplaces, the White House said.

Obama’s exchange plan covers only himself, not his family, and the premium is less than $400 per month, the White House said.

Administration officials have said they anticipated the pace of enrollment would increase as the year-end coverage deadline approached. Similar increases have been seen by many of the 14 state-run exchanges, state officials said.

State statistics

In Rhode Island, the number of private insurance plan enrollments through HealthSource RI more than doubled in the first two weeks of December, to 5,469 from the 2,649 that had enrolled in October and November.

In New York, about 168,000 people signed up in private plans sold through the state exchange, Jeremy Pelofsky of Ketchum Inc., a spokesman for New York State of Health, said yesterday in an email. In California, which also runs its own exchange, “our preliminary numbers are we’ve topped 400,000” enrollments in private plans, Covered California Executive Director Peter Lee said.

California planned to close enrollment yesterday for policies starting Jan. 1, Lee said, although anyone who started an application then will have coverage at the first of the year.

“We’ve been very clear that the 23rd is the deadline,” Lee said. “We’ve also been very clear that we’re going to help people get across the finish line if they’ve made a good-faith effort today.”

In addition to the private plans, at least 3.9 million people have been found eligible for Medicaid, the state-run health program for the poor, or for state children’s health programs since the exchanges opened Oct. 1, CMS, the agency overseeing enrollment, said in a report. It’s not known how many of those people have actually enrolled in the programs.

The Boston Business Journal reported Monday that the Massachusetts Health Connector has extended the deadline for customers in danger of losing their health insurance in the new year to Dec. 31. In some cases, customers will have until Jan. 10 to pay for the first month’s coverage.

“This new timeframe ensures that even more people can get into the best plan for themselves and their family in time for January,” said Connector Executive Director Jean Yang in a statement. “This has been made possible by extraordinary support from our carriers, Dell, our community action groups, and other stakeholders, and is very good news for members.”

Enrollment goal

The administration had set a goal of signing up 7 million people through the new federal and state insurance marketplaces by the March 31 end of the six-month enrollment period.

Obama earlier pushed back a key application deadline, delayed a small-business health exchange and extended a program for “high-risk” pools of sick Americans. On Dec. 19, his administration said hundreds of thousands of people whose health plans are being canceled because their coverage doesn’t meet Obamacare rules will be exempt next year from the health law’s mandate that all Americans carry medical insurance.

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