Relief. Frustration. Anxiety.
Chicagoans who rushed to buy an insurance plan through President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act before the open enrollment period ended Sunday expressed all three of those emotions.
Sunday was the last day consumers could buy a 2015 health insurance plan on the ACA’s online marketplace, which is where can look for new options with the help of tax credits.
Consumers who missed the deadline want an insurance plan through the marketplace will have to wait until next year’s open enrollment period, unless they qualify for a special enrollment period.
Anyone who had trouble completing the enrollment process on Feb. 15 will still be able to get a 2015 health insurance plan after the deadline, federal officials have said.
People who qualify for Medicaid, the state-federal program for low-income people, can enroll at any time.
Most navigators – people who are paid by the federal government or the state to enroll people in Obamacare – reported seeing a steady stream of people on Sunday who were looking to get Medicaid or buy a plan.
Olivia Ogbara, from Washington Park, wound up qualifying for Medicaid when she came to Komed Holman Health Center on the Southeast Side. After issues with the federally run website, Healthcare.gov, last year and then a lack of time because of her job, Ogbara said she was happy to finally get the process done.
“I’m just ready to get covered,” the self-employed fashion designer said.
Carlos Chavez, 44, of Chicago’s West Side, came to an enrollment event Sunday at Presence Saints Mary and Elizabeth Medical Center, eager to get health coverage for his wife and daughter. But he said the prices offered on the marketplace “were too high” for him to afford.
Chavez, who said he makes about $69,000, said he did not qualify for tax credits. Instead, he intends to pay the $325 penalty rather than having insurance, even though he’d like to have it.
“It did not take into account my other expenses . . . like my mortgage,” he said, through a Spanish translator. “The penalty is less money for us.”
The penalty for not having health insurance — through work or through the marketplace — will be 2 percent of income or $325 per person in 2015, up from $95 or 1 percent last year. It will continue to increase.
That penalty is what brought Louis Uruchima, 23, of Logan Square, to Presence, too.
“I’d been ignoring this issue for a while,” he said. “But I heard about the penalty and it got my attention.”
Uruchima found a bronze plan that will cost him $29 a month, factoring in his tax credit.
He said he was nervous, though, when he heard that those tax credits could be in jeopardy.
The U.S. Supreme Court is expected hear arguments in March in King v. Burwell, a case in which the justices will decide whether the Affordable Care Act is legally allowed to provide such subsidies in states that do not have a state-based marketplace. Illinois, like about two-thirds of all states, has a federally run marketplace.
Uruchima, who works as a forklift truck operator and is in college as well, said the full price of his bronze plan — $133 a month — “is a little too much.”
Felipe Cueva, 61, of West Lawn, was equally anxious Sunday when he found out that his tax credits, which make the health insurance plan he got “affordable,” might disappear.
“This problem is political,” he said, through a Spanish translator. “It’s upsetting to be in the middle of that.”
The federal government says 305,570 people in Illinois have already bought an insurance plan through the law as of Feb. 11, and about 78 percent of Illinois residents are estimated to qualify for an average of $210 per person a month in advanced premium tax credits.
