Obamacare Deadline Passes, What’s Next?

The time has come for Obamacare. The first Obamacare deadline has passed. The Obamacare extension has passed. Now there is nothing more you can do if you want your health insurance to cover you as of January 1st.

The Obamacare website has endured outages, glitches, and every problem under the sun, but as of now, it is sort of working, and people are signing up. The question on everyone’s mind is simply…What’s next?

Well, if you signed up for health insurance through the website, it is very important that you contact your carrier and make sure they received your application, processed it, and received your first payment. While it may seem easy once you navigate the website, if all of those conditions are not met, you do not have health coverage.

If you have not signed up yet, don’t worry. You can still sign up now for health insurance that will begin on February 1st. In fact, you have until March 1st to secure health insurance without having the government levy the first year’s Obamacare fine of $95 or 1% of your income, whichever is higher.

The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) now claims to afford citizens the luxury of being guaranteed insurance. Insurance companies can no longer deny you coverage for pre-existing conditions. Also, they cannot put a cap on lifetime care.

One of the major problems reported so far by people signing up for coverage is the insurance company receiving error filled applications from the exchange, making them unable to process the application.

Robert Zirkelbach, a spokesman for America’s Health Insurance Plans, which is one of the health insurance industry’s larger trade groups, said:

“The enrollment files have been getting better and more accurate, but there is still work that needs to be done. The health plans are still having to go back and fix some of data errors coming through in these files.”

If everything went as planned, you should receive a welcome packet from your insurance company outlining your new policy. Included in the packet is a note telling you that if you do not make your first payment by January 15th (health insurance companies have been nice enough to make payments received before the 15th retroactive to the 1st), you will lose your coverage.

The real important deadline that everyone must realize is March 31. By then, if you have not signed up for Obamacare health insurance, you will be unable to avoid the penalty for the first year, and you may have to wait until next October to sign up for coverage for 2015.

Did you make the deadline for applying for Obamacare Insurance?