Covered CA offers three-day grace period

Peter Lee, Covered California's executive director, departs San Diego after a promotional event at the San Diego Convention Center on Nov. 13.

Jan. 15, 2019 3:05 PM PT

Once again, Covered California is providing a grace period for those who need a little more time to finish their 2019 health insurance applications.

The state health insurance exchange added a little extra time for anyone who started an application before midnight Tuesday. That is the official deadline to sign up for a Covered California plan, but as it has in the past, the organization granted a little last-minute wiggle room. Those who started their applications by the deadline will have until Friday at midnight to complete the process.

Craig Gussin, a San Diego-area health insurance broker, said in an email Tuesday afternoon it has not been particularly hectic, but three more days is still a boon for last-minute shoppers.

“It has been quiet this week, and I don’t expect it to change,” Gussin said. “Yesterday we had three or four calls from people we have been working with already, and we are helping them finish their applications. I don’t expect many calls the rest of the week unless it is people we are already working with who heard about the extension.”

Covered California made similar moves in 2016, 2017 and 2018, adding a few more days after what was then a Jan. 31 deadline, allowing a similar grace period but only if applications were started before the deadline.

Golden State residents already enjoy a significantly looser standard than those in states where the federal government operates Affordable Care Act exchanges. In those states, the deadline was Jan. 15, and there was no grace period afforded to stragglers.

Federally-operated or facilitated exchanges in 39 states reported a total of 8.4 million plan selections for 2019, down nearly 4 percentage points from the 2018 total of 8.7 million.

That’s better than some projected might be the case given significant rate increases in some markets and zeroing out of previous “individual mandate” tax penalties in 2019. Those penalties have been levied on pretty much anyone who doesn’t purchase health insurance since 2014, the first year that Obamacare-era health exchanges started selling policies under the Affordable Care Act.

When it filed its budget in June, Covered California projected that elimination of the mandate and other factors would cause its total enrollment to shrink nearly 10 percent, falling from 1.37 million to 1.2 million. But, so far, the exchange is on track to beat that estimate by about 100,000 enrollees.

Though it has not released numbers for most of January yet, Covered California has signed up 1.45 million people across the state, somewhat less than the 1.52 million it had at the end of open enrollment in 2018.

Every year, the exchange sees its total enrollment figure dwindle. Some don’t pay their first or subsequent monthly payments or disenroll because they end up getting a job with employer-based health insurance. Applying the same shrinkage rate that the exchange saw last year, the organization would be on pace to end the year with more than 1.3 million enrollees, which would be a decrease of about 5 percentage points, half the rate that was expected during last year’s budget preparation.

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