Obamacare Delay Gave 750K Americans Time To Enroll In Coverage
Source: TPM
About 975,000 people signed up for coverage in December through HealthCare.gov before the Dec. 24 deadline, the administration announced Sunday. If you take President Obama's announcement that 500,000 enrolled through the federal website as of Dec. 20, that means at least an extra half a million people had a chance to sign up in the days after Obama's announcement -- already beyond the original deadline -- through the new one because of the administration delay.
In the 15 states running their own Obamacare websites, a rough count of the early numbers indicates that at least 300,000 people enrolled between Dec. 16 and Dec. 24. Put those figures together and more than 750,000 signed up for coverage during the extra week that the administration offered.
Some probably would have gotten signed up anyway if the deadline was never changed. But given the record traffic that HealthCare.gov saw in the last week before the new deadline, it seems self-evident that hundreds of thousands of people benefitted from the delay.
In addition to helping Americans get covered, the extension also helped the administration politically after a disastrous first two months. The enrollment total at the end of November -- 365,000 people -- was less than the administration projected for just the month of October. But by the Dec. 24 deadline, total enrollment should be around 2 million: still less than the 3.3 million that the administration projected for the end of December, but much closer to the mark.
Read more: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/obamacare-deadline-delay-enrollment
The extension were simply to avoid any gap in coverage such that if you signed up by the deadline, then you would have coverage starting on January 1st. The Obama administration could have stood pat based on the idea that people could simply sign up for coverage starting on February 1st. But, the extensions allowed more folks to avoid a gap or a delay in coverage, yet the MSM portrayed this as a bad thing.
