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Friday, November 15, 2013

Obama: Insurers Can Extend Canceled Policies Into 2014

Today's post was shared by Kaiser Health News and comes from www.kaiserhealthnews.org

President Obama announced Thursday that insurers will be permitted to extend canceled insurance policies into 2014, due to the difficulties consumers are having enrolling in new insurance coverage through the new online marketplaces.

More coverage: Obama Offers Fix For Insurance Plan CancellationsA transcript follows.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: ... It has now been six weeks since the Affordable Care Act's new marketplaces opened for business. I think it's fair to say that the roll out has been tough so far, and I think everybody understands that I'm not happy about the fact that the roll out has been, you know, wrought with a whole range of problems that I've been deeply concerned about.

But today, I want to talk about what we know after these first few weeks and what we're doing to implement and improve the law. Yesterday, the White House announced that in the first month more than 100,000 Americans successfully enrolled in new insurance plans.

Is that as high a number as we'd like? Absolutely not.

But, it does mean that people want affordable health care. The problems of the website have prevented too many Americans from completing the enrollment process, and that's on us, not on them. But, there's no question that there's real demand for quality affordable health insurance.

In the first month, nearly a million people successfully completed an application for themselves or their families, those applications represent more than 1.5 million people. Of those 1.5 million,...

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