The March 31 deadline to enroll for health insurance is coming . . . for some. The Washington Post reports that the HHS will push that deadline into April for people whose efforts to enroll were stymied by technological issues or because of HHS error. The proof: checking a box on healthcare.gov that indicates there were problems.
Healthcare.gov’s performance has been less than spectacular, particularly during its October launch, in which problems included the website freezing up and failing to enroll members even if they had gone through all of the enrollment steps.
However, technology is not the only thing keeping citizens from enrolling. A poll by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation found that 60% of uninsured patients don’t know about the March 31 deadline and 40% of the uninsured are not aware that they could be eligible for federal subsidies to help them pay for coverage.
Kaiser found that although 33% of the uninsured have said they’ve tried to get insurance over the last six months, 67% have not. The survey also found that half of the uninsured plan to stay that way.
