Enrollment for Obamacare ends Friday

Dec. 14--The deadline to enroll for health insurance under the federal Affordable Care Act in 2018 is Friday.

Signing up is done at healthcare.gov.

The deadline is Friday for people in Texas and the 38 other states served by the federal healthcare.gov for the health insurance marketplace. This year's open enrollment period was just six weeks, which is much less than previous years when the enrollment period was three months.

National news outlets are reporting daily enrollment has increased, but total enrollment due to the shortened enrollment period will decrease in 2018 compared to prior years.

Despite efforts by Republican members of Congress to repeal it, many of the key components of the ACA are still intact. So there's still the individual mandate that creates a financial penalty for anyone without health insurance, the employee mandate that creates a penalty for companies with at least 50 full-time employees not offering insurance, and the protections on pre-existing conditions. The GOP tax bill passed out of the Senate seeks to end the individual mandate, but that bill is still being worked on in conference committee.

A-J Media spoke with Jay Claborn, a member of the Lubbock Area Association of Health Underwriters and an independent health insurance broker at The Claborn Agency, shortly after enrollment began six weeks ago. Claborn said enrolling for marketplace coverage is similar to that in years past, and Lubbock again has two insurance options through the public exchange.

On healthcare.gov, users can review health plans, choose a new or the same plan, and find out if they qualify for subsidies to make insurance more affordable. The U.S. Health and Human Services Department estimates more than 80 percent of healthcare.gov customers get subsidies that lower their premiums.

Claborn said premiums, on average, for the better plans have gone up about 35 percent compared to last year. Because of that, he's seeing more people sign up for plans with lower premiums, but higher deductibles.

Claborn suggested people wanting to sign up for Obamacare take time to compare plans, not just automatically renew. If someone is changing plans, Claborn recommended making sure their preferred doctor is covered in the new plan.

According to numbers released by the prior administration, 11.5 million people signed up for coverage in 2017. Estimates released on healthcare.gov showed almost 19,000 people in U.S. House District 19 (that includes Lubbock, Plainview, Abilene and Big Spring) were enrolled in the ACA Marketplace as late as March 2016. This number doesn't include the amount of people who were able to get coverage because of the ACA's provision saying insurance companies can't reject or charge more because of a pre-existing condition.

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