Fox
News
Families
face coverage gap amid insurance cancellations, ObamaCare website
woes
By
Jim AnglePublished
December
03, 2013
The
Christmas rush this year won't just be for items that go under the
tree – for those trying to buy a new insurance policy effective
Jan.1, the deadline is Dec. 23.
“I
think it's fair to say that you're going to have to see hundreds of
thousands of people enroll pretty much every day between now and the
23rd in order to get to the goal,” said Dan Mendelson, CEO of
Avalere Health. “But [Obama administration officials] still have a
massive problem of millions of people that supposedly still need
coverage and a system that really isn’t built well enough to handle
that.”
The
goal is to sign up to 7 million people for private insurance and 9
million for Medicaid by the end of March, after which the IRS is
expected to start penalizing those who don’t have insurance.
But
it will be a heavy lift, and some Americans could inevitably
experience a coverage gap by Jan. 1 – since roughly 5 million
policies already were canceled because they didn’t meet the
requirements of ObamaCare, and the website to sign up for new
coverage isn’t working smoothly for everybody.
All
canceled policies expire on Jan. 1, so those families are now
scrambling to find a new one by the deadline of Dec. 23. So are those
who were uninsured to begin with, which leaves a huge backlog.
“The
rollout has been very rocky and it's caused major, major
disruptions,” Mendelson said. “And at this point, I think the
question is how do you operate a salvage operation that will get you
back on track?”
Mendelson
says so far, the total enrollment is about 150,000 for both the state
and federal exchanges, but more than half that -- 80,000 -- came from
just California, meaning the federal marketplaces are way behind...
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