The administration announced Friday that it will help out those people who remain uninsured in 2014 by giving them the opportunity to sign up through tax season. To help them out, the enrollment deadline
is being extended.
People who pay penalties for going uncovered in 2014 and are still uninsured will be allowed to visit HealthCare.gov until the end of April, said Andy Slavitt, principal deputy administrator at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the HHS unit overseeing implementation of the law. They will be able to apply for coverage starting March 15 as long as they attest that they didn’t learn about the health law’s requirement to carry insurance or pay the fine when they filed their taxes. The site had closed Sunday for most users.
The move comes after months of pressure from Senate Democrats, academics and tax preparers to give people a chance to get coverage at the same time they file their taxes. People who were uninsured in 2014 will face fines starting at $95 or 1% of their income—whichever is higher—when they file taxes this year. Fines grow to $325 or 2% of income for 2015, although millions of people qualify for exemptions.
This will be the first year that many uninsured will pay a tax penalty for not having coverage, and many of them will have never even heard of the penalty until they file their taxes. That's a big chunk of the uninsured, according to surveys from both
Urban Institute and the
Kaiser Family Foundation. The KFF survey found that a remarkable 46 percent of uninsured people it surveyed weren't even aware that tax credits existed to help make insurance more affordable.
Not everyone is thrilled with the idea that there should be a special enrollment period to help educate the uninsured, including the trade group America’s Health Insurance Plans. It creates confusion around deadlines and could encourage people to wait to sign up, they argue. They want to make sure that this deadline extension is explained as a special circumstance, and that it won't happen in the future. It's hard to imagine there being more confusion about the penalty and the deadlines, since so many of the uninsured were already confused and even completely unaware. Given how hard it's been for the administration and for the groups working on enrollment to reach this population, it only makes sense to do it now when they're filing their taxes and are a captive audience.