Obamacare rule change rattles insurance industry

By Elizabeth Williamson and Louise Radnofsky

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/obamacare-rule-change-rattles-insurance-industry-2013-12-23?siteid=yhoof2

Monday is the final day for consumers to get new health coverage that takes effect when the new year arrives, leaving thousands of people racing to sign up in time — and health insurers trying to figure out whether the federal health law will work in the way they had hoped.

The number of Americans enrolling continues to fall short of the goals the Obama administration has laid out, which is a problem for the White House.

It also represents a problem for the insurance industry, which calculated that the prospect of millions of new customers brought their way by the Affordable Care Act and its coverage requirements would make up for any disruption that came along with the law.

Karen Ignagni, the industry’s top representative in Washington, spent the weekend managing the fallout after the administration overhauled its approach to people who buy coverage on the individual market.

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The insurers Ignagni represents as head of the industry’s main lobbying group, America’s Health Insurance Plans, got late notice Thursday night of the new rules: People dumped by their insurers could buy bare-bones “catastrophic” plans or get a hardship exemption from having to buy health insurance at all. Those were customers Ignagni’s members were counting on to buy fuller coverage.

The pace of enrollment was picking up ahead of the Monday deadline. The federal agency running HealthCare.gov, the health-insurance website serving 36 states, said nearly 750,000 people visited the site over the weekend through noon Sunday.
But enrollment still looks to fall well short of projections by the Congressional Budget Office, which said in May that some seven million people would get private coverage under the law in 2014 with an additional nine million added to Medicaid rolls.