Volume 384, Issue 9956, 15 November 2014
WORLD REPORT Ahead of the next phase of enrolment for insurance plans, Republicans vowed to target the health law following their election win. Susan Jaffe, Washington correspondent, reports.
Federal health officials promise that last year’s embarrassing enrolment problems will not be repeated when the sign-up season begins on Nov 15 for 2015 health insurance policies offered under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). But even as more insurance companies and millions more Americans enter the second year of the health insurance programme, the opportunity for critics to chip away at it will never be better when Republicans regain control of Congress in January.
…Under the law, all adults are required to have health insurance and, with some exceptions, those without it are penalised. People who don’t get health coverage through their jobs can buy policies through the online state or federal insurance exchanges from Nov 15 to Feb 15. To minimise the delays many experienced last year, federal officials who run the exchanges in 37 states have shortened the application and no longer require shoppers to spend time setting up accounts before they can review the plans.
Although this month marks the second enrolment period, US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Sylvia Matthews Burwell has been eager to stress that it won’t be a rerun of last year. “It’s not year two”, she told reporters recently, because this is the first time the exchanges will be renewing current policies while also handling first-time applications. [MORE full text or PDF ]