Anyone who started to enroll but isn't finished by Monday will get an extension, federal officials said Tuesday
The Obama administration will grant an extension to people who say they are unable to enroll in the new healthcare program by next Monday's deadline, the Washington Post reported on Tuesday, quoting federal officials.
The Post said people who started to apply for Obamacare coverage through the HealthCare.gov website but cannot finish March 31 would have until about the middle of April to seek an extension.
The administration is scheduled to announce the change on Wednesday, the newspaper said.
People could qualify for an extension by checking a blue box on HealthCare.gov to indicate they tried to enroll before the deadline. The Post said the method would be based on an honor system and that the government would not try to determine if the person was being truthful.
Sources close to the Obama administration told Reuters last week that it would soon issue new Obamacare guidelines allowing people to enroll in health coverage after the March 31 deadline, but only under certain circumstances.
The sources said the new federal guidelines for consumers in the 36 states served by the federal health insurance marketplace and its HealthCare.gov website, would allow people to enroll after March 31 if they had tried earlier and were prevented by system problems including technical glitches.
President Barack Obama's signature Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare, requires most Americans to be enrolled in health coverage by March 31 or pay a penalty. It was not clear how much of an effort a potential applicant would have to make in order to qualify for a special enrollment period.
Last December, the administration granted special enrollment periods to thousands of people unable to complete enrollment on HealthCare.gov for coverage beginning Jan. 1. Similar steps have been expected for the March 31 enrollment deadline for several weeks.
Reuters
House committee chair: Sebelius lied when she said she doesn’t know how many ObamaCare enrollees paid their first premiums
POSTED AT 2:01 PM ON MARCH 26, 2014 BY ALLAHPUNDIT
Dave Camp uses the more delicate term “evasive and perhaps misleading” in his letter to her but it’s clear enough what he means. This wouldn’t be the first time the White House has been, ahem, evasive and perhaps misleading when it comes to enrollment data either. Sebelius and Jay Carney spent last October hemming and hawing over why they hadn’t released any early enrollment figures yet, insisting it’d be premature to do so and that numbers would be reported at regular intervals. Turns out they had a daily dashboard on Healthcare.gov that was keeping them updated all along. The big take on day one, as you might recall, was … six enrollments. Nationwide.
This new lie is more fun than the earlier one, though, just for the sheer balls required to muster the spin they’re using to deflect it.
Camp (R-Mich.) and Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas) say they have uncovered “new evidence” that “strongly suggests that the administration knows who has enrolled and paid their first month’s premium.”The congressmen pointed to an online regulations portal run by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) that says insurers are required to inform the agency of “the full enrollment and payment profile” for consumers on a monthly basis…“As we have said previously, information about who has paid his or her premium is collected by individual issuers and is not reported to CMS directly by enrollees,” HHS spokeswoman Joanne Peters said in a statement.“Until the automated payment and reporting system is completed and fully tested, and CMS is able to access individual enrollment and payment information from individual 834 forms, the payment information that CMS receives from insurers is neither final nor complete,” she added. “When we have accurate and reliable data regarding premium payments, we will make that information available.”In other words, insurers are required to report to CMS every month how many people have paid. The data exists and is right at CMS’s fingertips; even if it’s incomplete, the rate of payment among insurers who have already reported will give us some sense of the rate of payment nationally.But CMS, which built a website that didn’t work for two months and continues to have back-end problems to this day, doesn’t feel comfortable trusting outside entities. They’d prefer to use their own data, which … doesn’t exist yet because the website’s payment system still hasn’t been built. And they also want to be sure the numbers they give the public are “final” and “complete,” even though the whole reason people keep bugging them for payment data is that CMS’s own highly touted monthly enrollment figures aren’t remotely “final” or “complete” without it. Remember, if you missed the deadline to pay your first premium, your enrollment will be canceled; if it’s true, as anecdotal evidence suggests, that fully 20 percent of new enrollees failed to pay on time, that means HHS’s latest enrollment number of 5+ million as of March 1st could be off by a million people. If they were sincerely worried about misleading the public with incomplete figures, they’d refuse to release enrollment data at all until they knew for sure how many people were, or would be, bounced from the rolls on nonpayment grounds. As it is, they’re more than happy to release crap numbers which they know are artificially inflated in the name of doing what they can to help Democrats facing reelection this fall.While we’re on the subject, via the Free Beacon, here’s another brazen lie Sebelius told Congress a few weeks ago. Exit question via Dan McLaughlin: At what point is a special prosecutor finally on the table here?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/obama-administration-will-allow-more-time-to-enroll-in-health-care-on-federal-marketplace/2014/03/25/d0458338-b449-11e3-8cb6-284052554d74_print.html
Obama administration will allow more time to enroll in health care on federal marketplace
By Amy Goldstein,
The Obama administration has decided to give extra time to Americans who say that they are unable to enroll in health plans through the federal insurance marketplace by the March 31 deadline.
Federal officials confirmed Tuesday evening that all consumers who have begun to apply for coverage on HealthCare.gov, but who do not finish by Monday, will have until about mid-April to ask for an extension.
Under the new rules, people will be able to qualify for an extension by checking a blue box on HealthCare.gov to indicate that they tried to enroll before the deadline. This method will rely on an honor system; the government will not try to determine whether the person is telling the truth.
The rules, which will apply to the federal exchanges operating in three dozen states, will essentially create a large loophole even as White House officials have repeatedly said that the March 31 deadline was firm. The extra time will not technically alter the deadline but will create a broad new category of people eligible for what’s known as a special enrollment period.
The change, which the administration is scheduled to announce Wednesday, is supported by consumer advocates who want as many people as possible to gain insurance under the 2010 Affordable Care Act. But it’s likely to be criticized by Republicans who oppose the law and have denounced the way the administration is implementing it.
Administration officials said the accommodation is an attempt to prepare for a possible surge of people trying to sign up in the final days before the deadline. Such a flood could leave some people unable to get through the system.
“We are . . . making sure that we will be ready to help consumers who may be in line by the deadline to complete enrollment — either online or over the phone,” said Julie Bataille, director of the office of communications for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the agency overseeing the federal health-care exchange.
The extra time will not be restricted, though, to people who wait until the last minute to try to sign up. Although no one will be asked why they need an extension, the idea is to help people whose applications have been held up because of the Web site’s technical problems, or who haven’t been able to get the system to calculate subsidies to help them pay for coverage.
According to a Health and Human Services official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity about decisions that have not been made public, an exact time frame for this extension has not been set, and it will depend in part on how many people request it. Nor have officials decided precisely how long people will have to select a health plan after they get the extra time.
Once the narrower rules take effect, people will still be trusted to tell the truth about why they need more time — a method known as “self-attestation.”
The new rules are similar to steps being taken — or contemplated — by some of the 14 states that are running their own health-insurance exchanges.
Last week, the governing board of Maryland’s exchange, which has been hampered by serious computer problems, decided to let residents complete their enrollments after the March 31 deadline, as long as they had started the process beforehand. Minnesota officials announced this week that they would do the same thing. Oregon’s governor plans to announce a similar plan this week, according to his spokeswoman, and the board of Nevada’s exchange is considering several alternatives, including a special enrollment period.
The impact of such leeway, coming in the final days of a sign-up period that began in October, remains unclear. This year’s enrollment period is the first opportunity for Americans who are unable to get affordable insurance through a job to choose whether to enroll in one of the plans offered under the 2010 law.
In recent weeks, the White House and its allies have been mounting an intense public relations campaign to motivate people to sign up. Amid signs of increasing interest, federal health officials have privately worried whether HealthCare.gov could withstand an expected last-minute enrollment surge this weekend.
Administration officials have adopted an enrollment target of 6 million Americans, forecast this winter by congressional budget analysts. The analysts had lowered their previous prediction of 7 million after problems with HealthCare.gov thwarted many people who attempted to enroll during the fall.
Until now, the March 31 deadline has been the date by which most Americans must choose a plan — or risk a government fine in the form of a tax penalty when they file their 2014 taxes next year. The fine will not apply to people who get an extension under the new rules and enroll in plans within the allotted time.
The constituency that has been most wary of extra sign-up time has been the insurance industry. Insurance firms selling plans in the new marketplace want to minimize the possibility that people might wait to get coverage until they become sick — a practice that would undermine the central idea of keeping costs in check by balancing people who are expensive to insure with those who are healthy and require little medical treatment.
On the other hand, consumer advocates say it is important to give as many people as possible a chance to obtain insurance.
“The whole point of the thing is to get people covered,” said Jon Kingsdale, a health-care consultant and former director of Massachusetts’s insurance exchange, which was the first in the country, opening several years before the federal law set up a similar national marketplace. “In the first year, there has been so much confusion, I think it’s only natural there will be people who just don’t feel as if they fully understood what the law was and what they were supposed to do and that the opportunity would close.”
http://time.com/37055/supreme-court-women-dominate-arguments-on-contraception-coverage/
Supreme Court Women Raise Questions on Contraception Coverage
Justices Kagan, Sotomayor and Ginsburg aggressively questioned the corporate challengers who want exemptions from providing contraception under Obamacare at Tuesday's oral arguments. Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood Specialties say the measure violates their religious freedoms
The three women of the Supreme Court dominated questioning at the beginning of Tuesday’s oral arguments in a case pitting religious business owners against the new health care reform law’s mandate that employer-provided insurance cover contraceptive care.
The court case will determine whether Hobby Lobby, a Christian-owned craft store chain, and Conestoga Wood Specialties, a cabinet company, can be exempted from providing contraception coverage to female employees through federally mandated health insurance policies.
Supreme Court proceedings make for notoriously difficult and unreliable predictors of how justices might rule on a case. That said, Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg wasted no time in pressing the corporate challengers, according to the Wall Street Journal‘s live blog of the oral arguments.
Justice Sotomayor started by asking, if corporations can object on religious grounds to providing contraception coverage, could they also object to vaccinations or blood transfusions? Paul Clement, the lawyer representing the challengers, said that contraception is different, because the government has already given an exemption to religious nonprofits. Justice Kagan then said that there are several medical treatments to which some religious groups object, and if corporations could object to providing coverage for those treatments, “everything would be piecemeal. Nothing would be uniform.”
Much of the challengers’ argument is centered on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, which is aimed at preventing laws that substantially limit a person’s religious freedom. The law grew out of a conflict over whether two Native Americans could be dismissed from their jobs as drug counselors for using drugs in a religious ritual. The architects of the law said they intended it to be a protection of religious rights, not an excuse to foist religious principles on others.
Justice Ginsberg said it “seems strange” that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which was passed by both parties, could have generated such support if lawmakers thought corporations would use it to enforce their own religious beliefs.
Justice Kagan added that the corporate challengers are taking an “uncontroversial law” like the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and making it into something that would upend “the entire U.S. code,” since companies would be able to object on religious grounds to laws on sex discrimination, minimum wage, family leave and child labor.
Other points made by the female justices:
- Justice Sotomayor: how can courts know whether a corporation holds a religious belief? And what if it’s just the beliefs of the leadership, not the entire company? What happens to a non-religious minority in a corporation?
- Justice Sotomayor and Justice Kagan asked: Because nobody is forcing Hobby Lobby or Conestoga to provide health insurance, they can simply pay the tax penalty instead.
- Justice Kagan: women are “quite tangibly harmed” when employers don’t provide contraceptive coverage.
From Hot Air......
Democratic pollster warns Senate Dems on ObamaCare:
Don’t defend it
POSTED AT 6:41 PM ON MARCH 25, 2014 BY ALLAHPUNDIT
A tasty morsel from Paul Bedard — although the only reason this is filed under “news” rather than “duh” is because lefty pundits continue to float CW-defying “Democrats should run on ObamaCare” pieces sporadically whenever a new round of bad polls come out and they get the jitters. (These same people will be writing “scrap ObamaCare and embrace single-payer” pieces starting the day after election day.) Whenever they do, I imagine a bunch of Republican campaign honchos circa 2006 trying to talk themselves into running on the Iraq war. It’s the only thing they haven’t tried! The war will become popular again, it just … hasn’t been sold correctly yet. It’s so crazy it just. might. work.
Not going to work, says Celinda Lake.
“In terms of Obamacare, don’t defend it, say it was flawed from the beginning, and we’re going to fix it,” said Lake at a poll briefing hosted by the Christian Science Monitor.But, she added, it is key for Democrats to also stick to their historic approach of looking out for the little guy when it comes to health care. “Say,” she added, “we’re not going to go back to the days of leaving you on your own with the insurance companies.”Lake said the approach has several positives for Democrats. Namely, she said polling shows that most voters “want to fix it rather than start all over again.” She said women are especially “exhausted” by the drawn out fights over Obamacare.The Republican half of the Battleground Poll, Ed Goeas of the Tarrance Group, however said that Obamacare will still be a noose around the neck of Democrats because it is “symbolic” of the party’s big government approach.
What’s the alternative to doing it Lake’s way? If you’re a Democrat, you can’t run against the law full bore; there’s too much soundbite material there for the GOP to use against the rest of the party and it’s too grave an admission of misjudgment on your own part. If Mary Landrieu was too stupid not to oppose a paradigm-shifting boondoggle when she had the chance in 2010, she’s too stupid to go back to the Senate. So now she has to muddle through with some “mend it, don’t end it” nonsense about how the law’s principles were and are sound — preexisting conditions, subsidies, all the treats that people like — but that more needs to be done to bring costs down. You need Democrats in control to protect the good stuff while stripping out the bad; the GOP’s repeal effort will do nothing but restore the status quo. Every Democrat in the country who’s running in a purple district will take this line. There’s really no other choice. But having a respected Democratic pollster formally declare that it’s time to forget about defending the law as-is when we’re less than a week from the final enrollment deadline seems nonetheless significant. The poll watchers are prepared to admit political defeat even if the White House isn’t. Although, really, the White House already has.
Speaking of defeat, take a look at the table Harry Enten put together over at Nate Silver’s new site. Going back more than 75 years, only once has the party that controls the presidency at the time seen its generic ballot numbers improve between spring of a midterm election year and election day. The numbers almost always decline — suggesting that Democrats may become more, not less, vulnerable to a Senate takeover as 2014 wears on. There may be only one thing that can save their majority now. Yep, you guessed it: Drugs. Think about that while you marvel at the political know-how of one of the country’s most prized swing groups. Viathe MRC:
On cue: Obama administration extends healthcare deadline for people who started enrolling before March 31st everyone
POSTED AT 9:31 PM ON MARCH 25, 2014 BY ERIKA JOHNSEN
We all knew this one was coming, right? Administration officials can stand around and talk about how the March 31st deadline is the real deal until they’re blue in the face, but you know they’ve been watching the pace at which Healthcare.gov signups have been trickling in like hawks — and while they’ve been conspicuously backing away from their erstwhile goal of 7 million enrollments in the opening phase, this would seem to suggest that the pace still isn’t running as quickly as they’d like it to be. From the Washington Post:
The Obama administration has decided to give extra time to Americans who say that they are unable to enroll in health-care plans through the federal insurance marketplace by the March 31 deadline.Federal officials confirmed Tuesday evening that all consumers who have begun to apply for coverage on HealthCare.gov, but who do not finish by Monday, will have until about mid-April to ask for an extension.Under the new rules, people will be able to qualify for an extension by checking a blue box on HealthCare.gov to indicate that they tried to enroll before the deadline. This method will rely on an honor system; the government will not try to determine whether the person is telling the truth. …Administration officials said the accommodation is an attempt to prepare for a possible surge of people trying to sign up in the final days before the deadline. Such a flood could leave some people unable to get through the system.
An “honor system.” Glorious.
Pranksters strike again......
HHS: We Lack 'Statutory Authority' to Extend Deadline to Sign Up for Obamacare
5:07 PM, MAR 11, 2014 • BY JOHN MCCORMACK
On a conference call with reporters Tuesday afternoon, officials at the Department of Health and Human Services insisted that March 31 is the firm deadline to sign up for Obamacare. "We have no plans to extend the open enrollment period," HHS official Julie Bataille said. "In fact, we don't actually have the statutory authority to extend the open enrollment period in 2014."
A reporter followed up, asking why the administration could delay many other parts of the law but not this one. Michael Hash, who directs the Office of Health Reform at HHS, replied that the law states that the HHS secretary must set the open enrollment dates by June 2012, which Secretary Sebelius did. "Once that 2014 open enrollment period has been set, they are set permanently," Hash said. He did not explain why the administration has the authority to ignore other statutory deadlines to implement the employer mandate or cancel private health insurance plans not eligible for "grandfathering."
The president's unilateral delays of various parts of the law has drawn a lot of criticism fromRepublicans and constitutional experts. "Last week, Obama underlined what this means for our system: The administration unilaterally increased the transition time for individuals to obtain the level of insurance mandated by the Affordable Care Act," George Washington law professor Jonathan Turley wrote in Sunday's issue of the Los Angeles Times. "There is no statutory authority for the change — simply the raw assertion of executive power."
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