Obamacare enrollment extended until 10 p.m. Tuesday for Hawaii residents
ASSOCIATED PRESS
This screen grab from the website HealthCare.gov shows the extended deadline for signing up for health care coverage for 2020. The Trump administration says people will get more time to sign up for “Obamacare” health insurance following a spate of computer glitches over the weekend. The new HealthCare.gov deadline is 10 p.m. Tuesday in Hawaii.
Hawaii residents now have until 10 p.m. Tuesday to sign up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services announced today that they were extending the deadline two days to help out anyone who encountered glitches when they were trying to enroll by the original Dec. 15 deadline.
There were reports of outages and troubles with the website, HealthCare.gov, as hundreds of thousands of people raced to meet Sunday’s deadline. The deadline for residents in Hawaii also attracted controversy because residents were shut out of the system at 10 p.m.
CMS advertised the original deadline as Dec. 15, but didn’t warn residents in Hawaii that they essentially needed to get their applications in two hours early.
U.S. Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) had urged the agency to extend the deadline, arguing that Hawaii residents would assume they had until midnight.
CMS said in a statement that the agency was extending the deadline out of an “abundance of caution and that it’s “primary goal is to provide a seamless open enrollment experience for HealthCare.gov consumers and ensure that those Americans who want coverage offered through the exchange can enroll in a plan.”
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The enrollment deadline for the East Coast is 3 a.m. EST on Wednesday.
