Obamacare deadline extended as 2 million use site

NEW YORK: Consumers waiting until the last minute to buy health coverage under Obamacare received a reprieve as a record number of users visited the US online insurance marketplace.

The deadline to sign up for health plans that begin Jan. 1 was extended to midnight today from yesterday for most of the US, as healthcare. gov saw a single-day record of about 2 million visitors. Consumers who believe technical issues prevent their enrollment by the deadline can appeal beginning Dec. 26 to gain coverage effective at the start of 2014, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services said today.

President Barack Obama has struggled to carry out the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the biggest overhaul of the US 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.

“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.

“Our highest priority is making sure that everyone who wants to enroll to have health care coverage by Jan. 1 is able to do so, particularly since consumers had a hard time accessing healthcare.gov in October and November,” Julie Bataille, a CMS spokeswoman, said today in an e-mail.

The federal enrollment system has been functional since repairs to the site were announced Dec. 1, though it is still slow, said John Foley, a supervising attorney at the Legal Aid Society of Palm Beach County in Florida, a group authorized to help people sign up for coverage. Foley said his organisation's six “navigators” need about 90 minutes, on average, to enroll a customer, and the group can sign up a total of about 30 people on a good day.

“It's like molasses getting through it,” he said today in a telephone interview.

Errors at the site no longer halt a customer's progress, as they did in October and November, though “we thought we'd be able to get people into the system a lot quicker,” Foley said.

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