Ways and means are being tested for use in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic. One tool is to expand the enrollment period for Obamacare to people who have recently lost their jobs and to again offer the opportunity to enroll to people who have previously declined the healthcare coverage.
The expanded enrollment period expands the existing opportunity to enroll whenever a person loses their employer-based health coverage. Under this extension, the time is now. The new enrollment period involves less paperwork and also extends the availability of health care coverage to people who, like many baseball teams by analogy, would otherwise have no choice but to wait 'till next year. Instead, the time is now.
Persons who have lost their employer-based health coverage because they have lost their jobs in the pandemic, and people who previously declined coverage but would like to enroll now to protect themselves and their families against the healthcare costs of Covid-19, and enroll because of a broad special enrollment period in these States:
- California.
- Colorado.
- Connecticut.
- Maryland.
- Massachusetts.
- Minnesota.
- Nevada.
- New York.
- Rhode Island.
- Vermont, and
- Washington.
The District of Columbia reportedly is also opening its own broad special enrollment period.
People living in other areas will still be subject to the enrollment periods offered in those places, some of which are simply not broadly available even in this crisis. No word yet from the current regime whether they will open up enrollment with "a special enrollment period for the 32 states with markets it manages."
See Margot Sanger-Katz and Reed Abelson, Eleven States and D.C. Are Letting Uninsured Sign Up For Obamacare, NEW YORK TIMES, Tuesday, March 24, 2020, at A19.
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