Opposition to the individual mandate is at an all-time high, according to a new Rasmussen poll.
Fifty-eight percent of Americans don’t believe the government should require every American to have health insurance, up from 54 percent last month. Just 33 percent of likely voters support the mandate, a cornerstone of the president’s health care reform law.
The peak comes just weeks before the individual mandate kicks in on Jan. 1. The Obama administration and state exchanges are in the midst of a last-minute push to enroll as many Americans in Obamacare coverage as possible before the deadline, but things are looking iffy.
Although the number of Americans that have selected a health care plan via an exchange is still at just 30 percent of the levels the Obama administration needed, consumers that have made it almost all the way through the application process still might not end up getting their coverage Jan. 1.
The Department of Health and Human Services revealed over the weekend that as many as 15,000 applications on the federal exchange HealthCare.gov are incorrect due to errors in the 834 enrollment files sent from the federal government to insurance carriers.
Overall, HHS has a backlog of up to 60,000 applications that have been submitted to the federal exchange but not yet processed, according to a Washington Post report Friday. (RELATED: Report: 50,000-60,000 paper Obamacare applications still haven’t been processed)
The Obama administration has repeatedly pushed back its own deadlines to enroll in an insurance plan through an exchange in order to be covered by the time the mandate takes effect. This past Sunday was originally the cutoff but was extended to Dec. 23 and insurers will be required to accept payment for the first month’s premiums until Dec. 31.
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has gone as far as to ask insurers to “retroactively” insure consumers whose applications weren’t processed quickly enough, in an attempt to fix problems for consumers who have attempted to comply with the mandate.
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