Health plans reach 6 million

Queries up as deadline approaching

President Barack Obama meets with Pope Francis for the first time Thursday at the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace before health-care enrollment numbers were reported by the White House. “It is a great honor. I’m a great admirer,” Obama told Francis.
President Barack Obama meets with Pope Francis for the first time Thursday at the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace before health-care enrollment numbers were reported by the White House. “It is a great honor. I’m a great admirer,” Obama told Francis.

WASHINGTON - Six million Americans have signed up for private health plans under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama said Thursday, a symbolic milestone for a government that has struggled to get the law off the ground.




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Obama announced reaching the mark on a conference call with thousands of workers who had helped enroll people, according to an email the White House sent to reporters. The president encouraged the workers in the call “to redouble their efforts” before Monday, the deadline when Americans must have started the application process or face a fine of up to 1 percent of their income.

Nearly 4 million people have visited healthcare.gov, the federal enrollment website, since Monday and hundreds of thousands of people have phoned government call centers in advance of the deadline, officials said. States running their own enrollment systems under the Affordable Care Act have reported a similar surge.

“We’re seeing a lot of interest, a lot of demand in these final days of the enrollment period,” said Cecilia Munoz, the director of the White House’s Domestic Policy Council.

The Affordable Care Act was aimed at offering health insurance to most of the nation’s 48 million uninsured residents. The 6 million mark meets an estimate published by the Congressional Budget Office in February. That figure was revised down from an initial estimate of 7 million before website problems slowed enrollments after the Oct. 1 start.

Munoz and other top administration officials, including Obama’s senior adviser, Valerie Jarrett, and the U.S. health secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, have been dispatched to Republican-run states around the country this week to observe and assist enrollment efforts.

In most states, people who don’t begin an application for coverage before 11:59 p.m. on Monday won’t have another chance to enroll before November, when they can sign up for coverage that will start in January 2015.

The government said March 17 that 5 million people had enrolled, suggesting that more than 100,000 per day, on average, have signed up since then.

The figure released Thursday does not take into account how many people paid their first premiums, the final step required to complete enrollment. That number could be much smaller.

Congressional Republicans have criticized the Obama administration for not revealing the number of people who have paid their premiums. Federal officials have said they don’t have a complete count from insurers.

Citing the uncertainty over how many people have actually secured coverage by paying their premiums, market analyst Caroline Pearson suggested celebrations are premature.

“It matters politically,” she said. “It doesn’t matter from a market perspective.”

Still, achieving the 6 million level was a relief to congressional Democrats. The law remains unpopular with the public, and Republicans are making its repeal their rallying cry in the approaching midterm elections.

“The Affordable Care Act is working,” House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California said in a statement Thursday. “Republicans should abandon their reckless pursuit of new milestones in the number of votes to repeal or undermine this historic law.” The GOP-led House has voted more than 50 times to repeal, defund or scale back the law.

But some Democratic lawmakers were hedging their bets.

Six senators, five Democratic and one independent, on Thursday rolled out a series of policy proposals they said were intended to fix and improve the Affordable Care Act.

Three of the Democrats - Sens. Mark Begich of Alaska, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Mark Warner of Virginia - are up for re-election in 2014. Democratic candidates in both the House and Senate are under increasing pressure to distance themselves from the Affordable Care Act.

The other Democratic senators, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, as well as Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, rounded out the group of centrists who laid out their plans in an article in Politico Magazine on Thursday.

The move reflects part of a broader strategy by Democrats, who are grappling with how to escape the negative political effects of the healthcare law - which passed with no Republican votes - while not going as far as their Republican counterparts who are trying to repeal it.

The Democratic plan calls on vulnerable Democrats to talk candidly about the health-care law’s problems while offering their own solutions.

“I’ve said from the very beginning that we need to make some fixes so the health-care law works better for Alaskans,” Begich said, in a statement. “Alaskans want real results, which is why I have laid out a series of common sense solutions to increase choices for consumers, eliminate unnecessary burdens and make the health care law more flexible for families and businesses.”

The package of roughly a half-dozen policy proposals is intended to increase choice and affordability when consumers are choosing a healthcare plan, as well as to ease the burden on small businesses. Many of the proposals already have been pushed by individual senators.

Aides to the senators acknowledge that the fixes are hardly exhaustive or brand new, but they said the goal was to create a road map of specific and achievable policy goals on which to focus, which could then be voted on either individually or as a package.

After saying that the current Affordable Care Act is “not perfect,” the senators wrote, “That’s why today we are laying out some next steps to further improve implementation and ease the transition not only for individuals and families, but also for small businesses.”

Some of the measures include adding a Copper Plan to the existing marketplace options (Platinum, Gold, Silver, and Bronze), which would cost less but have a higher deductible, and directing state insurance regulators to create health plans that could be sold across state lines - a move the senators believe would increase both consumer options and competition.

The senators also suggest making small-business health-care tax credits available longer and making them accessible to more employers to make it easier for small businesses to cover their employees.

They also favor offering an additional, permanent way to enroll in the healthcare marketplace other than healthcare.gov, the government website that has been plagued by problems.

“Before, during and after the debate over health reform,” Warner said in a statement, “I consistently said that the Affordable Care Act was not perfect, and that Congress would have to revisit the ACA to correct problems for consumers and employers as this new, improved system was implemented.

“We have designed some targeted, common-sense improvements to keep what works and improve what could work better for Virginia families and employers, and we will continue to look for ways to make the ACA work better for everybody.” Information for this article was contributed by Alex Wayne of Bloomberg News; by Ashley Parker of The New York Times; and by Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar and David Espo of The Associated Press.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 03/28/2014

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