WASHINGTON — The federal agency overseeing the Affordable Care Act insurance marketplaces started sending re-enrollment notices Tuesday night to the millions of people who purchased new coverage this year. And these consumers won’t have a lot of time to act if they want to get a better deal on health insurance starting in 2015.
The next open-enrollment period starts Nov. 15 and runs through Feb. 15. But individual consumers enrolled in Affordable Care Act health plans will have until just Dec. 15 to pick a new plan and be enrolled by Jan. 1. Otherwise, they’ll be automatically re-enrolled in their plan, which could cost them more in 2015.
About 7.3 million people were enrolled in marketplace health plans as of mid-August, according to the latest count from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the agency running the HealthCare.gov portal in 36 states.
Shopping for health insurance isn’t exactly the easiest thing to do, and inertia tends to keep most people in their existing coverage.
CMS officials said they have made the HealthCare.gov shopping process easier for this coming enrollment period. People coming back to the site this year will have their applications automatically filled out, for example.
Federal officials are urging consumers to take certain steps as they consider 2015 coverage. As this past enrollment period showed, consumers are pretty deadline-driven. About half of enrollees signed up for 2014 coverage in the final four weeks of the sign-up period, according to the CMS.
This is the first time the marketplaces have had to handle re-enrollment, which presents new issues for the government and the industry. One potential hiccup lies in how health plans will be informed that existing enrollees have switched plans and are no longer their customers. And that’s why the CMS is emphasizing the Dec. 15 date – to give the marketplaces and health insurers more time to sort out the coverage musical chairs. How that’s all going to work is still being tweaked.
“It’s something that we’re defining very specifically now,” Kevin Counihan, the new marketplace chief executive, said at an insurance industry conference Wednesday morning. “That’s one of the reasons that we believe having that December 15 deadline is so critical, because it’s going to give time for communication between the federal exchange and the respective issuers.”
If existing enrollees miss the Dec. 15 date, they can still shop for a new plan during the enrollment period, which ends in February. That new coverage won’t start until after January, however.
If enrollees have had a change in income or household circumstances, they will also have to update that information to make sure they get the correct subsidy next year.
“It may never be perfect for every single enrollment transaction,” Counihan said, “but we’re clearly making very good progress.”
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