Saturday is last day to buy insurance

Saturday will be the last day to buy health insurance on the exchange, and Oklahomans who don’t sign up by then will have to find another form of coverage or go without for 2019.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services reported 66,480 Oklahomans had enrolled in a plan as of Dec. 8. Barring a lastminute surge, enrollment is likely to be down substantially from last year, when 73,147 people in Oklahoma had signed up as of Dec. 9.

Nationwide, about 4.1 million people had signed up as of last Saturday, down from about 4.7 million last year.

Andrea Chica-Rodriguez, a navigator with the Latino Community Development Agency, attributed some of the gap to confusion about when customers can sign up and whether buying insurance through the exchange will affect their immigration status.

Larry Levitt, senior vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, also pointed to the repeal of the individual mandate and cut-backs in advertising and outreach as factors that may have decreased enrollment nationwide.

People who still want to sign up need to create an account on HealthCare. gov and collect documents showing the identities of any family members they want to cover and their income last year. They also will have to estimate next year’s income.

Estimating income carefully is important because that’s used to calculate subsidies, which are available to households earning between one and four times the federal poverty line. For a family of four, that’s anything between $25,100 and $100,400.

In Oklahoma County, a family of four anywhere in that income range would have at least one option for a plan with no premiums, because the subsidy would be larger than the monthly cost of the plan. The lowest-premium plan may not always make sense because of other out-of-pocket costs like deductibles, however, or if a patient’ s doctors aren’t in network.

Chica-Rodriguez urged anyone interested in signing up not to wait until Saturday night, because President Donald Trump’s administration hasn’t signaled that it will offer a grace period if website issues prevent some people from finishing their enrollment.