At the end of the open enrollment period last year, the Obama administration was desperate to pad the numbers to make the program look more successful than it really was. One of the things they did was to extend the enrollment period for anyone who claimed they had tried to sign up before the March 31 deadline but couldn’t, in the hope that more people would sign up.
Apparently a few Obamacare supporters in Congress are looking to repeat the administration’s previous extension gambit:
Dems to press administration for ObamaCare sign-up extension, as fines loom
The official sign-up season for President Obama’s health care law may be over, but leading congressional Democrats say millions of Americans facing new tax penalties deserve a second chance.
Three senior House members told The Associated Press that they plan to strongly urge the administration to grant a special sign-up opportunity for uninsured taxpayers who will be facing fines under the law for the first time this year…
The lawmakers say they are concerned that many of their constituents will find out about the penalties after it’s already too late for them to sign up for coverage, since open enrollment ended Sunday.
That means they could wind up uninsured for another year, only to owe substantially higher fines in 2016. The fines are collected through the income tax system.
I’m sure it’s entirely coincidental that Democrats are looking at a potentially enraged electorate getting hit with Obamacare’s taxes as the 2016 presidential campaign gets underway.
Sean Parnell ([email protected]) is a research fellow for health policy at The Heartland Institute.
