New wiggle room on health plan

White House upbeat on sign-ups

WASHINGTON — There won’t be a magic moment, but the Obama administration’s much-maligned health insurance website should be able to weather an expected year- end crush of customers, officials asserted Friday.

A combination of software fixes, design changes, added hardware and newly announced wiggle room should provide the right combination to finally deliver a workable website, White House troubleshooter Jeffrey Zients said in an upbeat assessment. Zients is a management consultant parachuted in by the White House to ex- tricate President Barack Obama from a technology debacle that has sent his poll ratings into a nose dive.

“We think this gives us the capacity we need to reach everybody we need to reach across this period of time,” said Zients.

The added leeway comes in the form of an extra eight days this year for consumers nationwide to sign up and still get insurance by Jan. 1. A previous Dec. 15 deadline was stretched to Dec. 23. Policyholders must pay their premiums by Dec. 31.

More time could prevent some people from having a break in coverage on account of the balky enrollment website. That’s critical for those losing current individual policies that don’t measure up under the law, and also for high-risk patients in a small federal insurance program that ends this year.

For the insurance industry, the announcement only complicated the balancing act. Every week a new edict from the administration sends the companies scrambling. More time for consumers means less time for insurers to verify enrollments and correct errors.

“It makes it more challenging to process enrollments in time for coverage to begin on Jan. 1,” said Robert Zirkelbach, of the trade group America’s Health Insurance Plans. “Ultimately it will depend on how many people enroll in those last few days.”