EDITORIAL: Spread the word — it’s Obamacare enrollment time

Laura Jones Macknin recently encountered a young Uptown woman who had lost her company health insurance and had unwittingly enrolled in a short-term insurance plan with shoddy benefits.

It’s easy to do that if you just look online. You can be overwhelmed by the pitches from shady operators.

“I don’t think she knew where to go,” Jones Macknin said.

But Jones Macknin, a “navigator” working through Presence Saint Joseph Hospital-Chicago to set people up with insurance through the Affordable Care Act, helped the young woman sign up for much better coverage.

That’s one of countless stories of how the Affordable Care Act — also known as Obamacare — has changed people’s lives for the better. But if the word doesn’t get out that it’s time to enroll for Obamacare for next year — and that the enrollment period has been cut in half to just six weeks — our nation inevitably will witness many more needless health care tragedies.

The Trump administration and Republicans in Congress are out to sabotage the Affordable Care Act, for which open enrollment started Wednesday and will continue through Dec. 15. Having failed to kill it by legislation, they’d like to starve it to death by cutting funding and undermining enrollment.

If they’re successful, we’ll go back to the days when many more families were bankrupted by medical bills and insurance was yanked just when people needed it most.

This year’s shorter annual sign-up period could result in fewer people enrolling. Sicker people likely will continue to sign up, but the many healthier people the system needs to keep costs down might never get around to it. On top of that, many people wrongly believe that the ACA already has been discontinued or that premiums have become too expensive.

Across Illinois, hospitals, other health care providers, social service groups and the state government are trying to get the word out that it’s time to enroll for non-group health insurance for next year. On Wednesday, former President Barack Obama via Twitter urged people to sign up.

But that didn’t stop President Donald Trump on Wednesday from saying that an essential component of the ACA, the so-called individual mandate, should be repealed as part of a tax-cut plan moving through Congress. The mandate is a requirement that individuals who are not in group plans buy health insurance. Without that requirement, many more people would not buy insurance until they got sick, again causing premium costs to soar.

Trump and congressional Republicans already have used an executive order to undermine the ACA. They have ended “cost-sharing reduction” payments that help lower premiums; allowed small employers to band together to offer stripped-down insurance, and trimmed “risk corridor” payments, which compensated some insurance companies that offered coverage to people who had medical conditions that were expensive to treat.

To sign up for health insurance through the Affordable Care Act, go to healthcare.gov or getcovered.illinois.gov. You also can call (866) 311-1119 Monday through Friday from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. (except on Thanksgiving) and on Saturday and Sunday from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.

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