There’s still time to sign up for health coverage — barely

Sacramento Bee (CA)

Jan. 31--Still need health coverage for 2018? You're got until 11:59:59 Wednesday night to enroll in insurance policies offered through the Covered California marketplace.

While the federal marketplace closed enrollment in dozens of other states on Dec. 15 this year, California maintained the Jan. 31 deadline. As of Jan. 21, Covered California announced, 342,000 new consumers had signed up for health insurance, and the pace of new enrollees for the current open-enrollment period remains ahead of last year. It was Jan. 23, 2017, when new sign-ups surpassed 320,000.

In addition, officials said, more than 1.2 million existing Covered California members have renewed their coverage for 2018.

"California has done such a very good job of engaging the insurance companies and keeping the markets stable and encouraging the enrollment of healthy people. Insurers feel like they're doing well in this market," said George Kalogeropoulos, founder and CEO of Sacramento-based HealthSherpa, a software platform used by individuals, brokers and insurance companies to sign up for health-care policies.

Kalogeropoulos said it would be all hands on deck at his company HQ on H Street on Wednesday as they try to ensure all consumers and brokers have the help they need to get through the last seconds of open enrollment. But the volume on the HealthSherpa website, he said, will not be nearly as high as it was on Dec. 15, 2017, the final date for enrollees who wanted their coverage to start on Jan. 1 of this year.

"The deadlines coming up in the next day or so, we'll probably see somewhere on the order of a third of the volume we saw on Dec. 15," Kalogeropoulos said. "I see that as a good sign. It's a sign of a healthy market. It means people understand that, if they want their coverage uninterrupted for the whole year, they really have to sign up by Dec. 15."

To learn more about coverage, visit coveredca.com. Since 2014, more than 3 million people have enrolled in health insurance through Covered California, and roughly 4 million have gotten coverage through the state's Medi-Cal program. Consequently, the rate of the uninsured in California dropped to a historic low of 6.8 percent in June of last year, compared with 7 percent in 2013.