The government has just expanded its assistance for purchasing insurance to provide Americans with more help.
The deadline is now less than a month away, and as Americans scramble to make their last minute insurance purchases in order to comply with the health care reform, the Obama administration has bent a few of the rules to help to ensure that people won’t be left without coverage due to struggles with some of the state run exchanges.
Residents of states where the insurance exchanges have never been made to work properly aren’t stuck.
The federal government has now said that within the states where the health care reform has involved dysfunctional online marketplaces, it will help to pay for certain plans that customers go ahead and purchase on their own. Once the individuals in those states can finally sign up through the actual exchanges, then those plans will be made retroactive.
These rewritten health care reform rules are meant for people in any state but are focused on those with exchange problems.
This means that the people in Maryland and the three other states in which the online insurance exchanges have never managed to function properly, will finally have the help that they need to know that they will be able to purchase the coverage that they require to comply with the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate and avoid facing a tax penalty for having been unable to buy a plan because of the malfunctioning websites.
Those are four out of the total fourteen states that took on the creation of their own online exchanges under the 2010 law. While some of the individual state exchanges have been the most successful in the country and have managed to make themselves highly attractive to uninsured individuals who need to purchase their health plans, others have been riddled with problems from the very start. Maryland, Oregon, Hawaii and Massachusetts have not been able to iron out the problems in their exchanges, quite yet.
This is interesting in the case of Massachusetts, particularly, as it already had an insurance exchange up and running well before the health care reform kicked in. It was at that time – when it needed to start an interaction with the federal computer system for determining subsidy eligibility – that things started to fall apart.
