With deadline near, ‘Obamacare’ getting its last-minute looks
By Jerry Zremski and Stephen Watson, The Buffalo News, N.Y. | |
McClatchy-Tribune Information Services |
Monday is the deadline to enroll for coverage for this year on the NY State of Health insurance exchange. So if you don't have health insurance yet, you have the weekend to figure out whether to sign up, or if you would rather pay a penalty that starts at
Insurers expect a wave of last-minute sign-ups even though, according to health care experts,
"We're especially busy, and I think that's been true throughout this whole episode," said
For individuals, though, the question of whether to sign up for coverage is a very personal echo of the policy debate that has haunted the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act since before its passage four years ago.
For "young invincibles" such as
"I'm not going to volunteer and sign up just to pay for other people's health care," Zandrowicz said.
But for people such as
"I'm an excellent example of how the website is not the policy," said Stengel, who took five tries over as many days to enroll through the state website but now is saving nearly
Website in N.Y. 'works'
States such as
The statistics show that
As of last week, 342,895 New Yorkers had enrolled in private health plans on the state's exchange. That's about 34 percent of the people thought to be eligible to do so.
In contrast,
"
Thanks to the pace of early sign-ups in the state,
In addition, 374,312 New Yorkers signed up for
In other words, in
The Obama administration announced Thursday that it has met its goal, too, of signing up 6 million people nationwide for health care this year, despite the often-balky federal website and troubles on various state exchanges.
In states using the federal exchange and those with troubled exchange websites, enrollment has been slower because in many cases people resorted to applying for insurance on paper, said
"The website in
Last chance until fall
And while the federal HealthCare.gov has rebounded from its early troubles, the Obama administration this week announced that it is allowing some flexibility for those who have tried to sign up for health insurance on the site but won't complete their application until after
In
While state officials and advocates of health care reform are making a push to enroll as many people as possible by Monday, a number of uninsured are having trouble selecting a plan.
After Monday, if you can't document that you have insurance for 2014, you face a penalty of
The penalty, deemed the "individual shared responsibility provision" by the
But there are plenty of exemptions to the penalty, most notably for those who can prove they experienced a "hardship" as defined by the
Among those who will end up paying a penalty, many have calculated they're better off doing that than paying for coverage they don't believe they need.
Zandrowicz, the real estate agent, doesn't have a regular primary care physician or a dentist and has been without insurance since early 2013.
The
People such as Zandrowicz are a big problem for Obamacare, which was designed on the premise that by requiring everyone to buy insurance or pay a penalty, the young and healthy would, in essence, subsidize the new health policies of the older and sicker.
Getting 'peace of mind'
So far, though, local enrollees have tended to be older than desired by the architects of the insurance marketplace.
"The demographic is mixed. It's skewing toward older, but that isn't a surprise to us," said
Of the younger enrollees, some were drawn to the low-cost options of lesser-known companies.
"Still happy I have it for the peace of mind, though, in case anything crazy happens," said Guy, a freelance writer who lives on the
Yet there's a downside to those cheap high-deductible plans.
"The proliferation of high-deductible plans has certainly caught some people by surprise, quite frankly, in that you have to pay out of pocket for medical services upfront until they meet their deductible," said Dr.
The biggest concerns that
"I think it's been quite a mixed bag. I think there's no other way to describe it," Friedholm said of the health care law. "We knew it was going to be hard, and we knew it was going to be a long slog."
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