This Year, Health Care Shopping Season Ends Early
Friday was the last day to enroll in an Affordable Care Act health plan on HealthCare.gov.
And like the shopping rush on Christmas Eve, loads of people waited until the last minute and found themselves waiting on hold for telephone help, or in lines for in person help.
Google Trends showed searches for the web site surge over the last four days of open enrollment.
At least one enrollment counselor in Northern Virginia was bracing himself for the final rush.
"Every year when you get close to the end, that's when you have a lot of people come in," Brima Bob Deen told Shots.
He’s the president of Salvation Academy, which is a job training center that caters mostly to immigrants in Northern Virginia. But during the government’s open enrollment period, almost all his time was taken up helping people choose insurance coverage.
As of last Sunday, 4.7 million people had enrolled in health plans for 2018 and more than a million of them were new customers. That number will surely spike when last week’s sign-ups are counted.
But even with the end-of-season rush, fewer people are probably going to end up with insurance through the ACA exchanges next year.
Trump To ACA: You're Supposed To Be Dead
There are a whole bunch of reasons, but two major ones were the efforts of President Trump and Republicans in Congress to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Over and over the president declared Obamacare to be dead.
In addition, the administration cut the open enrollment period in half and got rid of nearly all advertising and outreach for the ACA.
That left people with less information and less time to get covered.
Still, by Thursday, the phone lines were so busy that the HealthCare.gov website told people to leave their names and telephone numbers and an agent would call them back after Friday’s deadline to ensure they can buy a policy that goes into effect next year.
That’s the story if you want to buy insurance through HealthCare.gov. But if you live in one of the nine states plus or Washington D.C., that runs its own exchange, you’ve still got time. Here’s the list.
Congress Could Leave Kids Out In The Cold
While people were rushing to get their coverage, Republicans in Congress were working on a tax bill that could make many of them less frantic next year.
That’s because one provision in the legislation would eliminate the tax penalty for people who don’t have health insurance. That’s the individual mandate that so many people love to hate.
And while Congress focused on taxes, parents across the country worried their kids' insurance would disappear.
The Children’s Health Insurance Program covers kids whose families don’t make a lot of money – but just too much to qualify for Medicaid.
CHIP lapsed in September as lawmakers made a last ditch effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and Congress hasn’t gotten around to reviving it.
We talked to Ariel Houghton in Pittsburgh who’s worried her two kids will lose coverage early next year.
"They could have worked on something in August or July, and passed it in September," Houghton says, "instead of just letting funding lapse and playing this game of chicken with our children's health insurance."
Doctors say CHIP is crucial to families with kids who have serious medical problems. But doctors and researchers say CHIP is also important to provide preventive care and basic treatment. They say it saves money in the long term because it stops simple illnesses from turning serious.
Stay tuned! We'll be tracking how the massive tax bill making its way through Congress affects health care access and costs.
-- Alison Kodjak, NPR health policy correspondent
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