THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER – New Year’s Day marks the official start of Obamacare coverage, but the problem-riddled rollout of the online federal exchanges is having another unintended consequence: Some who signed up won’t be able to go to the doctor or get the prescriptions they need in early January.
The Obama administration over the last month has worked to ramp up enrollments in the online health care marketplace by extending the deadline to sign up by a week. But those deadline delays and the late surge in applications caused headaches for many insurance companies who couldn’t process all of them quickly enough for coverage to begin on Jan. 1.
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Many of the insurance companies involved are taking unprecedented steps to compensate for the enrollment backlog, offering to extend the deadline that consumers must pay for their first-month premiums for days or weeks while they rush to get the first bills to customers.
As of Monday, only about half of enrollees for plans offered by more than 100 insurers had paid their first month’s premium, the Wall Street Journal reported. Over the last two days, payment premiums have been flooding in, making it difficult to assess what percentage of people can be confident of their coverage.
Read more at The Washington Examiner.
