The Obama Administration on Thursday announced it is extending the midnight deadline for Affordable Care Act insurance by four days because of the overwhelming demand by consumers who logged onto Healthcare.gov and called into the call center operators to buy insurance that takes effect Jan. 1.
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“Nearly a million consumers have left their contact information to hold their place in line,” Healthcare.gov CEO Kevin Counihan said in a statement late Thursday. “Our goal is to provide affordable coverage to everyone seeking it before the deadline, and these two additional business days will give consumers an opportunity to come back and complete their enrollment for January 1 coverage.”
The news of increased demand for health insurance comes just as Republican members of Congress and President-elect Donald Trump vowed to repeal the law.
As it did in previous years, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services decided that giving people more time was far more preferable than angering them if they couldn’t get insurance because they couldn’t get through. Counihan said, that millions of Americans had already signed up for coverage, and tens of thousands more were in the process of getting coverage Thursday.
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The new deadline for Healthcare.gov for coverage that starts Jan. 1 is now 11:59 pm PT on Dec. 19. The final deadline is Jan. 31 for health coverage in 2017. Healthcare.gov handles Affordable Care Act insurance sales for the 38 states that don’t run their own exchanges. California, New York and Connecticut, which all operate their own exchanges, already had Saturday, Dec. 17 as their deadlines for Jan. 1 coverage. The state exchanges for Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Washington state were even more generous, setting Dec. 23 as the cut off for Jan. 1 coverage.
On Wednesday, Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell said that enrollment momentum was building leading up to the deadline and that about 700,000 people signed up for plans Monday and Tuesday alone.
