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| People line up to enroll for health insurance at the Alamodome in San Antonio, Texas on Monday, March 31, 2014. The deadline is just hours away to sign up for insurance in the first enrollment period under President Barack Obama's signature health care law. |
WASHINGTON
(AP) -- In a flood of last-minute sign-ups, hundreds of thousands of
Americans rushed to apply for health insurance Monday, but deadline day
for President Barack Obama's overhaul brought long, frustrating waits
and a new spate of website ills.
"This is like
trying to find a parking spot at Wal-Mart on Dec. 23," said Jason
Stevenson, working with a Utah nonprofit group helping people enroll.
At
times, more than 125,000 people were simultaneously using
HealthCare.gov, straining it beyond its capacity. For long stretches
Monday, applicants were shuttled to a virtual waiting room where they
could leave an email address and be contacted later.
Officials
said the site had not crashed but was experiencing very heavy volume.
The website, which was receiving 1.5 million visitors a day last week,
had recorded about 1.6 million through 2 p.m. EDT.
Supporters
of the health care law fanned out across the country in a final dash to
sign up uninsured Americans. People not signed up for health insurance
by the deadline, either through their jobs or on their own, were subject
to being fined by the IRS, and that threat was helping drive the final
dash.
The administration announced last week that people still in line by midnight would get extra time to enroll.
The
website stumbled early in the day - out of service for nearly four
hours as technicians patched a software bug. Another hiccup in early
afternoon temporarily kept new applicants from signing up, and then
things slowed further. Overwhelmed by computer problems when launched
last fall, the system has been working much better in recent months, but
independent testers say it still runs slowly.
At
Chicago's Norwegian American Hospital, people began lining up shortly
after 7 a.m. to get help signing up for subsidized private health
insurance.
Lucy Martinez, an unemployed single
mother of two boys, said she'd previously tried to enroll at a clinic
in another part of the city but there was always a problem. She'd wait
and wait and they wouldn't call her name, or they would ask her for
paperwork that she was told earlier she didn't need, she said. Her
diabetic mother would start sweating so they'd have to leave.
She's
heard "that this would be better here," said Martinez, adding that her
mother successfully signed up Sunday at a different location.
At
St. Francis Hospital in Wilmington, Del., enrollment counselor Hubert
Worthen plunged into a long day. "I got my energy drink," he said.
"This is epic, man."
At a Houston community
center, there were immigrants from Ethiopia, Nepal, Eritrea, Somalia,
Iraq, Iran and other conflict-torn areas, many of them trying anew after
failing to complete applications previously. In addition to needing
help with the actual enrollment, they needed to wait for interpreters.
Many had taken a day off from work, hoping to meet the deadline.
The
White House and other supporters of the law were hoping for an
enrollment surge that would push sign-ups in the new health insurance
markets to around 6.5 million people. That's halfway between a revised
goal of 6 million and the original target of 7 million. The first goal
was scaled back after the federal website's disastrous launch last fall,
which kept it offline during most of October.
The
insurance markets - or exchanges - offer subsidized private health
insurance to people who don't have access to coverage through their
jobs. The federal government is taking the lead in 36 states, while 14
other states plus Washington, D.C., are running their own enrollment
websites.
New York, running its own site, reported more than 812,000 had signed up by Sunday morning, nearly 100,000 of them last week.
However, it's unclear what those numbers may mean.
The
administration hasn't said how many of the 6 million people nationally
who had signed up before the weekend ultimately closed the deal by
paying their first month's premiums. Also unknown is how many were
previously uninsured - the real test of Obama's health care overhaul.
In addition, the law expands coverage for low-income people through
Medicaid, but only about half the states have agreed to implement that
option.
Cheering on the deadline-day sign-up
effort, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius planned to
spend much of the day Monday working out of the department's TV studio,
conducting interviews by satellite with stations around the country.
Though
March 31 was the last day officially to sign up, millions of people are
potentially eligible for extensions granted by the administration.
Those
include people who had begun enrolling by the deadline but didn't
finish, perhaps because of errors, missing information or website
glitches. The government says it will accept paper applications until
April 7 and take as much time as necessary to handle unfinished cases on
HealthCare.gov. Rules may vary in states running their own insurance
marketplaces.
The administration is also
offering special extensions to make up for all sorts of problems that
might have kept people from getting enrolled on time: Natural disasters.
Domestic abuse. Website malfunctions. Errors by insurance companies.
Mistakes by application counselors.
To seek a
special enrollment period, contact the federal call center, at
1-855-889-4325, or the state marketplace and explain what happened. It's
on the honor system. If the extension is approved, that brings another
60 days to enroll.
Those who still don't get
health insurance run the risk that the Internal Revenue Service will
fine them next year for remaining uninsured. It remains to be seen how
aggressively the penalties called for in the law are enforced.
Also,
the new markets don't have a monopoly on health insurance. People not
already covered by an employer or a government program can comply with
the insurance mandate by buying a policy directly from an insurer.
They'll just have to pay the full premium themselves, although in a few
states there may be an exception to that rule as well.
Supporters of the law held their breath early Monday when the website was taken down.
Administration
spokesman Aaron Albright said the site undergoes "regular nightly
maintenance" during off-peak hours and the period was extended because
of a "technical problem." He did not say what the problem was, but an
official statement called it "a software bug" unrelated to application
volume.
In Oakton, Va., enrollment counselor Rachel Klein said she noticed the website was running slowly.
"We
all came into it understanding that today was going to be challenging,"
said Klein. "We're all relieved that there's going to be a little extra
time for people."
House Speaker John Boehner
of Ohio said Monday that Republicans remain committed to repealing
Obama's law. But its supporters are wasting no time trying to shape the
next open enrollment season, starting Nov. 15. The advocacy group
Families USA will announce ten recommendations Tuesday to make the
system more consumer-friendly.
They range from
providing more in-person assistance with sign-ups, to eliminating
premium penalties for smokers, to aligning enrollment with tax-filing
season.
