You Can Still Enroll in Health Care

The deadline for enrolling for a health insurance plan under the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) ended yesterday at midnight. However, in order to facilitate the completion of enrollment for people who missed the deadline, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has instated a Special Enrollment Period, which will run from today, April 1, 2014 through Saturday, April 15, 2014. 

What does that mean? 

If you have not completed the application process, you will be able to choose a plan by April 15, 2014. You qualify for the special enrollment period if you:

• Faced exceptional circumstances, such as a serious medical condition or natural disaster.
• Experienced an enrollment error such as the marketplace being unable to verify your identity, unable to make a profile, website errors or you were enrolled into a plan you did not want or select.
• Display error on the Healthcare.gov website, including display of incorrect plan data regarding premiums and benefits, and a variety of other system errors or error messages.
• You were found ineligible for Medicaid but your applications wasn’t transferred from the state Medicaid agency to the marketplace.
• Experienced domestic abuse – you can apply for a plan through May 31.

Applicants using the Internet to enroll will see a pop-up box which will prompt them to indicate that they tried to enroll and, by “no fault of their own,” were unable to. You will have to provide information on what exemption your situation falls into. 

If you need help determining your eligibility, please review the full listing of exemptions, with examples, which can be found on healthcare.gov. If you need further assistance, please call the LULAC National Office at 202.833.6130.