Obamacare enrollment for 2015 was supposed to have wrapped up at midnight, Sunday night, but glitches in the income verification process on the federal exchange, and confusion in many states,
resulted in extensions.
The extension was prompted by the Saturday outage of an Internal Revenue Service function for Obamacare enrollment, which could have prevented about 500,000 people from enrolling. The glitch prevented some people from getting their income verified so they could enroll on HealthCare.gov and at least some state exchanges by the Sunday deadline.
The extension for those folks is until midnight, February 22. As of now,
46 states have announced extensions, some in the northeast due to the massive weekend storm. Washington State has extended enrollment there until the
end of the tax season arguing that since this is the first year people have to try to figure out the complicated interaction between their taxes and health insurance, many might have just realized that subsidies would be available. Three Democrats in Congress who were instrumental in the passage of Obamacare are
calling on the administration to follow Washington's lead for everyone. They're asking for a special enrollment period for these possible "tax season" enrollees.
The three are Michigan's Sander Levin, the ranking Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee, and Democratic Reps. Jim McDermott of Washington, and Lloyd Doggett of Texas. All worked to help steer Obama's law through rancorous congressional debates from 2009-2010.
The lawmakers say they are concerned that many of their constituents will find out about the penalties after it's already too late for them to sign up for coverage, since open enrollment ended Sunday.
That means they could wind up uninsured for another year, only to owe substantially higher fines in 2016. The fines are collected through the income tax system.
The administration hasn't released any enrollment numbers yet, and won't have anything definitive for quite a while, because of all these various extensions. The administration should seriously consider the tax season extension. In January, the Kaiser Family Foundation
survey found still unacceptably high levels of misunderstanding or lack of information amount the uninsured, including 46 percent—nearly half!—who had no idea that the tax credits exist to help them afford insurance. Sixty percent had no idea that the deadline was February 15, 11 percent had the wrong date, and 13 percent thought the deadline had already passed, or there was no deadline at all.
These are the people who might gain that awareness about the law and what it could do for them when they file their taxes, so it only makes sense to give them that opportunity. Plus, it would make Republican heads explode. That's always fun.