Obamacare enrollment period will end Friday

Some Georgians may be unaware of curtailed sign-up.

As the enrollment period for the Affordable Care Act’s 2018 health insurance plans enters its frantic final week, some Georgians still don’t know the time is almost up.

“It’s very important that people pay attention this week if they haven’t enrolled yet and get it done,” said Marc Jenkins, who helps people enroll in the plans. “We’re still running into people who are saying, ‘When does (the enrollment period) end?’ That’s not good.”

This year, the open enrollment period for plans under Obamacare, also known as the Affordable Care Act, was cut in half. It will now end after six weeks this Friday night.

That’s a big change, not only because of the amount of time available. In previous years people could wait to enroll after the holiday rush. Not this year.

No one knows for sure yet what impact that will have on enrollment numbers for 2017.

“Navigators,” who help enroll people under the law, and insurance agents have been extremely busy. Jenkins spoke to an Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Monday from a community center and food pantry in Summerville, in Chattooga County, where he had set up his desk to enroll people who came by. He could hardly juggle the questions from a reporter as clients sat and came by and asked him questions.

Indeed, the speed of enrollment has dwarfed last year’s.

But that’s not enough. To match last year’s total, the speed would have to be double. It hasn’t. Advocates are hoping the traditional last-minute surge of enrollment is much stronger this year, making up the gap, but that remains to be seen.

The Trump administration, which has been open about its antipathy for the ACA, has taken other steps as well that navigators say undermine enrollment. That includes gutting funding for advertising about open enrollment and reducing funding for the navigators. The administration has said that people know enough about the law by now not to need those prompts. President Donald Trump also revoked subsidies, resulting in further rate hikes for many planholders.

Moreover, surveys show that the president’s rhetoric over repealing Obamacare and the months of unsuccessful efforts to do that have sown deep confusion. A sizable fraction of uninsured Americans actually believe it has been repealed.

Those legislative efforts have not flagged, and the mandate that every American have health insurance may be repealed by the end of the year. But for now it is in effect. There is a group of people who aren’t mandated even now, though: those who try to find insurance but find it’s deemed not affordable by federal rules.

If people don’t enroll this week and they already had an Obamacare plan, they may be automatically re-enrolled. But they could wind up with a plan that they didn’t want. Navigators strongly urge planholders to take the time to re-enroll. They can try that themselves on the website, healthcare.gov, or they can get help from an agent or navigator.