The Obama administration wants health insurers to cover people who sign up but don’t pay:
Another Obamacare deadline was pushed back on Thursday and now the White House is asking insurers to accept late payments and still give individuals coverage in the interim. . .
HHS is asking insurers to accept payments through this extended date and give consumers additional time to pay their first month’s premium while still offering coverage starting on Jan. 1
Somehow I think giving people free health care will be a non-starter for most health insurers.
Why? I think the answer to that is actually the bigger news:
The latest pushback also comes after a glitch that was confirmed last week by CMS, that the back-end mechanism that allows the government to pay insurers for subsidized and cost-sharing plans had not yet been built. Insurance companies will have to bill the government for these premium tax credits, and the government has announced it will act in a timely manner.
OMG! They haven’t even implemented the part of the system that pays the government subsidies! Moreover, I can’t imagine why anyone would trust them to to “act in a timely manner” when they are proving, again and again, that they can’t.
UPDATE: More on this.
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