California extends Jan. coverage deadline AGAIN: Now out to 12/19!

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE  •  Dec. 16, 2016

Covered California Enrollment Continues to Surge for January Coverage

Deadline Extended to Dec. 19 to Align With Federal Marketplace

• Consumers now have through midnight on Monday, Dec. 19 to sign up and have their coverage begin starting Jan. 1.
• More than 67,000 new consumers selected a plan during the past four days.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Covered California is extending a key enrollment deadline for coverage starting Jan. 1 in order to align with a new federal announcement made yesterday that extends the deadline for HealthCare.gov states. 

Consumers enrolling through Covered California will now have through Monday, Dec. 19 at midnight to sign up for health care coverage that will begin on Jan. 1. 

Covered California hopes that by aligning the deadline with HealthCare.gov it will reduce any confusion that consumers may experience after hearing yesterday’s federal announcement, and give consumers the time they need to sign up for coverage.

Over the past four days, more than 67,000 new consumers have signed up for health coverage through CoveredCA.com or a certified enroller, including 19,000 on Wednesday and 23,000 on Thursday. By comparison, 62,000 consumers enrolled during the same four-day time period in 2015.

Overall, more than 196,000 consumers have signed up during the current open-enrollment period. 

“Many of our insurance agents are saying their stores are full and they’re booked,” said Peter V. Lee, executive director of Covered California. “Our responsibility is to keep the doors open as long as we can so that people have health care coverage on January first.”

While the deadline has been extended through Monday, Covered California wants to alert consumers that CoveredCA.com will be offline Sunday night for a regularly planned upgrade. The system will be unavailable to consumers starting Sunday at 7:00 p.m. and service will be restored by Monday morning at 7:00 a.m. 

Consumers interested in enrolling online can do so on CoveredCA.com. They can also get free and confidential in-person assistance, in a variety of languages, by clicking on “Free Local Help to Enroll.” They can find a nearby enroller or have a certified enroller contact them through the “Help on Demand” feature. Consumers can also enroll over the phone by calling Covered California at (800) 300-1506.

Open enrollment runs through Jan. 31, 2017. Consumers who enroll after the Dec. 19 deadline will have their coverage start on either Feb. 1 or March 1.

On a related note, they also included a quick update re. new enrollees. Their prior update stated 153,000 new people signing up as of Tuesday; they've added an additional 43,000 over the past couple of days, bringing their new enrollee total up to over 196,000.

Add this to the 1.2 million current enrollees who've renewed coverage (either actively or automatically), and that's 1,396,000 total enrollees to date for CoveredCA.