We Have Two Obamacare Fails This Afternoon

Fail One: Youth Obamacare enrollment groups learn that the Obamacare sign-up website won’t be working on National Youth Enrollment Day.

WASHINGTON — Saturday is National Youth Enrollment Day for Obamacare, a daydesigned to help make up for youth recruitment time lost while HealthCare.gov was down last year. It will be marked by a broad array of events, from Head Start information sessions to pub crawls.

The day will also feature a HealthCare.gov outage that came as a surprise to the White House allies who have been planning Feb. 15 enrollment activities for weeks.

“We just found that out,” said Aaron Smith, co-founder of the recruitment group Young Invincibles. “Obviously it’s unfortunate.”

“It’s not ideal,” another Obamacare ally said.

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Neither is Obamacare.

Fail Two: One in five Obamacare buyers didn’t pay their premium on time.

WASHINGTON — One in five people who signed up for health insurance under the new health care law failed to pay their premiums on time and therefore did not receive coverage in January, insurance companies and industry experts say.

Paying the first month’s premium is the final step in completing an enrollment. Under federal rules, people must pay the initial premium to have coverage take effect. In view of the chaotic debut of the federal marketplace and many state exchanges, the White House urged insurers to give people more time, and many agreed to do so. But, insurers said, some people missed even the extended deadlines.

Which means the enrollment numbers that the Obama administration is tossing around, which were already suspect, should be knocked off by at least 20%.

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