Obamacare's online enrollment platforms are a lot more 'ho, ho, ho' instead of 'slow, slow, slow' as a key first deadline for sign-ups arrives.
Monday is the deadline for people in most of the United States to sign up for individual and family Obamacare insurance plans that take effect Jan. 1.
By midday, the federal insurance exchange, HealthCare.gov, which serves two-thirds of the U.S., appeared to be working smoothly, as did a number of state-run exchanges.
'It's running well,' said Monica Mahaffey, spokeswoman for New York state's Obamacare marketplace. 'No problems with the site.'
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New York late last week extended to Saturday its sign-up deadline for coverage effective Jan. 1, citing snowstorms that slammed the western part of the state recently. Several other states-Massachusetts, Idaho, Rhode Island, Maryland and Washington-have extended deadlines as well, to as late as Dec. 23 in some cases.
But most Americans will have until midnight Pacific time Monday, at the latest, to sign up for coverage. If they don't do so, they will have to wait until Feb. 1 at the earliest for their insurance to go into effect.
At Connecticut's state-run Obamacare exchange, 'we are seeing very high volume,' said Jason Madrak, a spokesman for the exchange.
'As it relates to Web traffic, we typically see between 300-400 concurrent users on our site at any given time on a normal day. Today, we are seeing 750-850 concurrent users,' Madrak said in an email. 'For call center activity, as of 10 a.m. this morning, we had already seen 4,986 calls come in. To put that in perspective, we had 15,000 calls come in the entire week after Thanksgiving, so we could be poised to handle a week's worth of volume in one day.'
On Monday afternoon, Connecticut's exchange announced a 'grace period' for applicants.
'If customers have an application started and select a plan before midnight tonight, they can still get coverage beginning Jan. 1, as long as they complete the application and get us all the relevant information by midnight this Friday, Dec. 19,' said Jim Wadleigh, acting CEO of the exchange.
Karen Ignagni, president and CEO of the national industry group America's Health Insurance Plans, said, 'we're hearing quite a lot of volume over the weekend.'
'I think the plans are feeling very encouraged about what they're hearing from their beneficiaries being able to get through and having the support from the plans that they need,' Ignagni said.
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The relatively smooth operations at the enrollment sites stand in contrast to last year, when HealthCare.gov and several state-run exchanges flopped upon launch on Oct. 1, and then struggled to right themselves in time for December's first deadline to get coverage effective Jan. 1.
Even though HealthCare.gov was running much better by December, authorities effectively extended the mid-December deadline several times in recognition of the number of users clogging websites to try and sign up to meet the cut-off date. Tweet
Linda Davidson | The Washington Post | Getty Images
'We're so far ahead of where were were last year when nothing worked,' said Caroline Pearson, a vice president at the Avalere Health consultancy. 'A year makes a huge amount of difference in terms of the consumer experience. We haven't had any significant backlogs.'
Pearson said she has been surprised by the number of current Obamacare enrollees who have been actively re-enrolling in coverage. About 52 percent of the nearly 1.4 million HealthCare.gov sign-ups since Nov. 15 have been from existing customers.
'I was expecting it to be extraordinarily low,' she said. That's because most current enrollees will be automatically re-enrolled in their current plan unless they choose another option, and Pearson said other health insurance programs with such automatic re-enrollment usually see few people making changes.
However, Pearson said the volume of new customers signing up for Obamacare plans 'is down somewhat' compared wirh last year.
While she expects 'another flurry of enrollment' as the Feb. 15 open enrollment deadline approaches, Pearson said she expects national enrollment to fall several million people short of the 13 million people projected by the Congressional Budget Office for 2015. Just before the start of open enrollment this season, there were about 6.7 million paying Obamacare customers nationally.
'Last year, we got the easy-to-reach people, so to speak,' said Pearson, referring to customers who had been priced out of the market in the past, or who had medical needs that required them to have continuous insurance.
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The harder people to get to sign up, she said, are young people, Spanish speakers, as well as people who aren't aware of Obamacare's mandate that most people have insurance or pay a fine, and don't know that tax credits are available to help people pay for coverage purchased through a government-run insurance exchange.
'There's still a huge amount of ignorance,' Pearson said. Tweet
But Charles Gaba, a Web designer who has become a leading analyst of Obamacare enrollment data, said, 'I'm more confident.'
Last week, after HealthCare.gov revealed that nearly 1.4 million people had enrolled in Obamacare since the Nov. 15 start of enrollment, Gaba said, 'I went ahead and bumped up my February estimate by about a half million.'
Gaba now is projecting that 12.5 million people will be enrolled in Obamacare plans by Feb. 15. He also expects there to be about 7.5 million people enrolled in time to have coverage effective Jan. 1. For enrollment to be in effect, a customer must make their first month's premium.
'I'm just more optimistic about the new enrollees,' Gaba said. 'I suspect there's going to be a second big wave in February, just as there should have been over this weekend.'
People who don't make that next big deadline may be in for a very rude awakening. Americans who lacked health insurance coverage in 2014 face potential fines when they file their taxes in 2015 equal to $95 per individual, or 1 percent of taxable income, whichever is higher.
'There's some heavier penalties for 2015,' said Mark Steber, chief tax officer of Jackson Hewitt Tax Service.
Those penalties will be the higher of $325 or 2 percent of taxable income per individual who lacks insurance for up to eight months in 2015.
'It's a big penalty,' Steber said.
Jackson Hewitt had advised customers last season about their tax exposure if they failed to have insurance, and the company also had partnered with Web-based insurance broker Getinsured.com to provide enrollment services for people who wanted to sign up for coverage. But not many people took advantage of the opportunity to sign up, Steber said.
'This year, we're expecting a great deal more interest,' he said.
That's because the penalty for lacking coverage in 2014 only goes into effect this coming tax season, and because people may have talked to others who received subsidies, or tax credits that helped them pay for premiums.
Most Obamacare customers qualify for that subsidy assistance, which is available to people who earn between one and four times the federal poverty level.
'That's always a pleasant discussion,' said Steber, referring to the moment when tax preparers tell people how much they can receive in subsidies.
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