Although the health insurance sign-up process has gone much more smoothly this year than last, computer problems have still stymied some would-be applicants, according to a report in USA Today. Therefore, the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has extended the deadline to Feb. 22 for people who encountered serious difficulties.
“For those consumers who were unable to complete their enrollment because of longer than normal wait times at the call center in the last three days or because of a technical issue such as being unable to submit an application because their income could not be verified, we will provide them with a time-limited special enrollment period for March 1 coverage,” said Aaron Albright, a spokesman for CMS.
The special enrollment period begins today and ends Feb. 22.
The event that led CMS to take the measure was the outage on Feb. 14 of an Internal Revenue Service component that prevented some people from getting their income verified. The problem affected HealthCare.gov and at least some state exchanges, impacting about 500,000 people
