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Heritage Foundation
Where You Can
Buy Health Insurance After Today
Amy Payne
March 31, 2014
Today is kinda-sorta the deadline to sign up for Obamacare, though if
you want to say you’re “in line” for coverage, the administration is
okay with that. (If your state is running its own Obamacare exchange,
it may be keeping its deadline firm, so check with your state.)
When we wrote about the Obamacare deadline and penalty recently, a
reader brought up a great question: Can you still buy health insurance
after March 31?
She asked, “If I chose to go uninsured, but end up with a massive
medical issue,” could she “just buy insurance and be covered, you know,
since they must cover pre-existing conditions”?
The answer is yes. If you don’t have Obamacare-compliant health
insurance by today, you could pay the penalty for this year—depending
on the amount of flexibility the administration decides to offer in its
latest delay—or you could still purchase a policy anytime in the
individual market outside the Obamacare exchanges. The amount of time
you go without coverage determines your penalty—or as the IRS calls it,
your “shared responsibility payment.”
Under Obamacare, the new pre-existing conditions rule means that you
can wait until you develop a health problem to get your policy. This
isn’t great for the system, because healthy people’s premiums are
needed to pay for the sick people. So if fewer healthy people buy
health insurance, the system has a problem.
That’s why the Obamacare system has a mandate forcing everyone to buy
insurance, a (somewhat) set enrollment period, and a financial penalty
to back it up.
If you don’t already have employer-sponsored insurance or coverage
through a government health program, your options are the Obamacare
exchange or the individual marketplace. Policies in both have to comply
with all of Obamacare’s rules and benefit mandates, so the big
difference is the taxpayer-funded subsidies.
The subsidies are supposed to be the big draw of the Obamacare
exchanges—but it turns out they aren’t as simple as they seem. And
holding onto a subsidy can encourage people to stay stagnant in a
job—or worse, not seek employment. As Heritage experts have explained
and the Congressional Budget Office has confirmed, “The law gives
millions of Americans new incentives not to work—or not to raise their
income levels—because they may lose federal insurance subsidies.”
Today’s deadline marks the end of the open enrollment period to buy
subsidized coverage in the exchange. Enrollment for subsidized coverage
doesn’t officially start again until November 15 of this year.
As we’ve noted, however, there are now quite a few ways you can qualify
for an exemption from the individual mandate, in addition to the new
box you can supposedly check on HealthCare.gov to indicate that you
need more time to sign up.
Whether it’s your state or the federal government running your nearest
Obamacare exchange, the goal remains the same. Heritage experts Robert
Moffit and Ed Haislmaier described the transition from the old
individual market to “private coverage in name only”:
The primary goal of the Obamacare exchanges is to establish federal
control over state health insurance markets by enforcing new federal
insurance rules and requiring federal standardization of health
benefits.
And policies in the remaining individual market must, by law, look
exactly the same. You can buy them anytime, but the benefit design
isn’t likely to be much different. (Just watch how long you go without
coverage, or the penalty for being uninsured will kick in.) Obamacare
doesn’t improve on the old health insurance market—which is why we need
patient-centered reforms that give people more choice.
Read this article with links, plus others, at Heritage Foundation
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