Widespread extensions ahead of midnight deadline

The Saturday outage of an Internal Revenue Service function for Obamacare enrollment could have prevented about 500,000 people from enrolling, but nearly all should have the chance to sign up thanks to widespread deadline extensions and now-smoothly running sites.

The glitch prevented some people from getting their income verified so they could enroll on HealthCare.gov and at least some state exchanges by the Sunday deadline.

The outage was reported by the Department of Health and Human Services at about 2 p.m. Saturday and resolved around 8 p.m., but it's unclear when the problem was first discovered.

Uninsured Americans faced a Sunday night deadline to join the more than 10 million who have already enrolled in private health coverage this year through the Affordable Care Act. Those who don't finish their applications by the deadline because they can't get through on the website or are on hold with call centers can get an extension, but HHS was urging everyone to try to finish Sunday.

As of 8:30 p.m. Sunday, the Department of Health and Human Services reported having 80,000 concurrent visitors on HealthCare.gov. That was the highest day since Dec.15, which was the deadline for coverage that started Jan. 1.

The federal call center took more than 250,000 calls on Sunday alone.

"We resolved the systems issues that prevented some consumers from submitting their applications," U.S. Department of Health and Human Services spokeswoman Katie Hill said in a statement Saturday night. "Consumers who were impacted should log in to their Marketplace account now and click on their 2015 application to finish it and complete their enrollment for health coverage."

The federal call center had taken more than 68,000 calls by early afternoon Sunday. The wait time was about 13 minutes, up from about 2½ minutes in late January and despite the addition of 40% more call center workers last Monday.

Charles Gaba, a data expert who runs ACASignups.net, says he expected about 500,000 people to enroll Saturday and it remains unclear how many succeeded. Those who had already been through the income verification process were unaffected by the outage.

Gaba said all but six states - Minnesota, Vermont, Kentucky, Idaho and Hawaii - and the District of Columbia had announced extensions by Sunday evening.

Massachusetts posted a notice online Saturday that it was affected by problems with the "Federal Data Services Hub," but Kathleen Tallarita of Connecticut's exchange says her state was unaffected. But Sunday evening, she urged residents who made a "good faith attempt" to sign up, call the exchange to notify them.

Washington state exchange spokeswoman Bethany Frey said Sunday that "similar to other state exchanges, I can confirm that we were affected by the IRS service disruptions yesterday."

Gaba, whose enrollment predictions have been eerily close to reality, says he lowered his prediction of a total 12.5 million enrollment for 2015 to a range of 12.2 million — 12.5 million after HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell said she "wasn't expecting this weekend's surge to be as large as last spring."

He expects total enrollment of 11.7 million — 800,000 less than he had predicted — as of midnight Sunday, but expects extensions to help bring the numbers back up once those later deadlines expire.

Bolstering Gaba's optimism for an even later surge: California and New York also had similar extensions to HealthCare.gov's, while blizzard-battered Massachusetts had an eight-day extension that would also allow people to start applications during that time.

People with incomes above the federal poverty level must enroll in coverage by one of these deadlines or face an IRS penalty of $325 per person or 2% of household income, whichever is greater.

Less than a week before the deadline, HHS had surpassed its prediction of 9.1 million enrollees nationwide for 2015. Federal officials pointed specifically to recent increases in the South. The fastest week-to-week growth rates are in Louisiana, Nevada, Mississippi, Texas and South Carolina.

Officials had already said procrastinators might face waits when they contact call centers or try to sign up online on the final day.

If people "have been working on an application and it hits the stroke of midnight, they are going to be able to continue on their application, and we will make sure that anybody that's in line gets to enroll," CMS principal deputy administrator Andy Slavitt said last week.

Only about 25% of the applications the private enrollment site HealthSherpa.com was sending were getting through Healthcare.gov on the first try starting at 6 a.m. PT, says co-founder Ning Liang, who cited the income verification outage as the cause.

At about 5 p.m. ET, Liang says his system had "100% success rates again." It got through the backlog in two hours, enrolling about 8,000 people in health insurance, he said. When Healthcare.gov is down, Liang says his site automatically tries to get the application through using its own software integration with the federal data hub.

Even if it can't, the site has already started an application for consumers so they would qualify for an extension, he says.

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