White House grants 6 week extension to March 31 on Obamacare sign-up.

[pnwmom]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/28/obamacare-enrollment-extension_n_4171799.html

WASHINGTON (AP) — With website woes ongoing, the Obama administration Monday granted a six-week extension until March 31 for Americans to sign up for coverage next year and avoid new tax penalties under the president's health care overhaul law.

SNIP

Under the latest policy change, people who sign up by the end of open enrollment season March 31 will not face a penalty. That means procrastinators get a grace period.

Previously you had to sign up by the middle of February, guaranteeing that your coverage would take effect March 1, in order to avoid fines for being uninsured.

The extension — granted for 2014 only — addresses confusion that was created when the administration set the first open enrollment period under the law from Oct. 1-March 31.

SNIP

[BlueStreak]

1. Not exactly the smartest PR move to announe this on a Monday after a TWO-DAY outage of the website

You know exactly how the media will spin this -- that Obama caved in because of all the problems on healthcare.gov. The outage actually had nothing to do with the design of healthcare.gov. It was a failure in the Verizon network.

Considering that most people thought enrollment was open until March 31 anyway, this is the kind of story you put out on Friday evening.