NJ Obamacare enrollments now at 74K, feds say – The Star-Ledger

Less than three weeks before the deadline for Americans to get health insurance, federal officials reported another 20,000 New Jersey residents have signed up for policies via the Obamacare website.

All told, 74,000 people have acquired private health insurance through one of three New Jersey insurance carriers offering policies on the website.

On the Medicaid front, an additional 16,000 signed up, bringing the total for the expanded program to 123,000.

Nationally, enrollment is up to 4.2 million — a number that will require an unprecedented surge in last-minute sign-ups to hit the Obama administration’s goal of 6 million.

The Affordable Care Act requires nearly all Americans to have some kind of health insurance by March 31 or face a possible fine via their income tax filings.

Much of the final push will be aimed at young adults, whose participation is crucial if insurance pools are to have enough money to cover older, sicker Americans.

That’s why President Obama participated in actor/comedian Zach Galifianakis’ mock interview show “Between Two Ferns.” The show generated the largest number of referrals to the federal website today — 19,000 of those who watched the video proceeded to heatlhcare.gov.

Nancy Metcalf, who studies health insurance for Consumer Reports, said many consumers fail to understand the March 31 deadline is also to get private insurance for the year, not just to avoid a fine. People who decide to sign up April 1 will have a rude surprise, she said.

“If you don’t get private insurance by the end of the month, you can’t get it again until 2015, not even if you get sick and would really, really like to have it,” she said. “If you need your appendix out in August you’d better be prepared to pay that $20,000 hospital bill yourself.”

In November, open enrollment will resume for policies that go into effect in 2015.

The number of New Jerseyans who have joined the state’s expanded Medicaid program is undoubtedly larger than the number cited by Washington, said Joel Cantor, director of the Center for State Health Policy at Rutgers University.

People can enroll in Medicaid directly, without going to the federal website, he said. In addition, they will be able to enroll throughout the year.

He found the regular, non-Medicaid enrollment figure a bit low. One theory is that people who knew they wouldn’t be able to renew policies that were doomed for cancellation grabbed the chance to renew early, he said. That means they’re covered for now.

The administration is counting on a e spike of March enrollments that will rival the flood of pre-Christmas applications. And officials insist their website, healthcare.gov, will be able to handle the traffic now.

The dropped calls, hold times and slow webpage load times that plagued the site last fall have been addressed, officials said, by adding capacity, tweaking the website, and hiring 2,000 operators.

In their conference call with reporters, HHS officials refused to predict if they’d meet their goals. However, in an internal HHS memo obtained by The Associated Press last fall, officials set a goal of 96,000 enrollments from New Jersey — or another 22,000 this month..

Although all sorts of regulations have been changed or delayed since enrollment began in October, the March 31 deadline is a hard one.

“We have no plans to extend the open enrollment period,” said an HHS spokeswoman.