The Affordable Care Act Marketplace has extended the deadline to enroll in health insurance for the coming year to Dec. 18, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid. The original deadline for coverage to begin on Jan. 1 was Dec. 15, but those who enroll after the new deadline will have an insurance plan that takes effect on Feb. 1.
According to USA Today, this is only the second time an extension has been granted for people to enroll in health insurance plans; the last extension was in 2016.
Noah Lang, the chief executive of Stride, a company that helps people find health insurance, indicated that the extension could help the currently uninsured secure coverage for themselves or their families.
“This extra three days gives people time to shop,” he said. “Millions (of people) are still not insured or can save money,” Lang told USA Today.
The number of new enrollees, or people who don’t currently have health insurance through the ACA Marketplace, is down 32% from last year.
In a survey by Stride earlier in December, 55% of respondents said that the incoming administration had them worried about their future health insurance coverage, which led them to not enroll in the ACA Marketplace.
Lang indicated that these worries are unfounded.
“Plan options and prices are locked in for 2025. Coverage won’t change, and ACA credits won’t change,” Lang said.
Another reason he gives for the slip in enrollment is simply the time of year, as it is, after all, the holiday season.
“It may have been the first time we had the enrollment deadline on a Sunday night,” Lang told USA Today. “People are spending their weekends shopping (for the holidays) and spending time with family,” not searching for insurance coverage on the marketplace.
The other piece to the ACA puzzle is the cost.
Although 40% of those who procure insurance through the marketplace pay less than $10 a month, the average monthly premium for a 40-year-old on a Silver plan is $621.
Though many people will likely pay less than that, a $400 insurance premium is a hefty price to pay when combined with other household expenses.
According to ValuePenguin, health insurance costs vary with age. Typically, the older you get, the more expensive your coverage will be due to the increased need for various types of medical care.
The only exceptions to this rule are people who live in Vermont or New York; in those states, a person’s age is not a factor in health insurance rates.
According to Vox, the ACA was supposed to allow people who were not covered by an insurance plan through their employer but made too much to qualify for Medicaid to have coverage.
However, Americans remain the most likely among developed nations to say they skip paying for insurance because it is too expensive.
Part of this is because it is more politically expedient to forgo a public option, which would allow more people to opt into government plans like Medicare and Medicaid.
This, and the fact that the healthcare industry is invested in profit at the expense of the average American, is largely why Sen. Bernie Sanders’s Medicare-for-all push to cover every American through a federally funded healthcare plan failed.
Moderate Democrats, like President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, decided to pursue iterative reforms instead. These reforms have given America the most convoluted healthcare system among all developed nations.
Due to a lack of initiative at the federal level and Americans’ distrust of nationalized healthcare, America is stuck with a system that relies on for-profit insurance companies to compete for better rates. This system does not work for most Americans.
According to Robert Hughes, a professor of business ethics at Wharton University, although the United States lacks the political will to completely transform its healthcare system, there are ways to make it more accessible.
“I don’t understand why there’s so much resistance to the idea of truly universal health insurance in the United States, given that this is something that other industrial countries just do,” Hughes told the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School in 2020.
He continued, “We can’t wave a magic wand and go back to 1946. (when the employer-sponsored healthcare system became entrenched as healthcare policy) I don’t see the United States completely uprooting all these insurances. And that means we might need to create a model that keeps a lot of what we have, making it more accessible to more people, rather than creating all new institutions from scratch.”
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