Firm Deadline
U.S. Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius reiterated earlier this week that the administration will neither extend the March 31 deadline to sign up for Affordable Care Act plans or lift the mandate to carry coverage. People liable for the mandate who don’t have insurance will pay fines, in the form of extra taxes next year, amounting to as much as 1 percent of their income. Exemptions from the mandate will be decided on a case-by-case basis, the government said.
It’s likely that the administration has tried to make the mandate easy to avoid, said Joseph Antos, a health economist at the nonprofit American Enterprise Institute who advises the Congressional Budget Office. Mendelson, of Avalere Health, said the government would be wise to clarify who is likely to be approved for an exemption.
“They know that the individual mandate will be very hard to enforce, and the penalty for not complying both difficult to determine and politically disastrous to try to collect,” Antos said in an e-mail. The government’s published list of exemptions, he said, is probably intended “to give people who don’t like the mandate ideas of how they can avoid it.”