A health insurance race

Associated Press

WASHINGTON — Facing a rapidly approaching deadline, the White House and its allies are racing to enroll young people in new insurance plans offered under President Barack Obama’s signature health care law, a sweeping effort that underscores how crucial the so-called young invincibles are to the measure’s success.

An army of workers and volunteers is targeting people between the ages of 18 and 34 on college campuses, in bars, and even in laundromats. The recruiting effort is based in part on lessons learned from Obama’s presidential races, which revolutionized the way campaigns tracked voters.

“On the campaign, you want to be able to find an Obama voter, and you want to get them to vote,” said Matt Saniie, who worked on the 2012 campaign’s data team and is now analytics director at the organization Enroll America. “In the enrollment world, you want to find someone who is uninsured, and you want to get them to enroll.”

More than any other group, participation from the young invincibles will be crucial to the law’s success. Young people tend to be healthier, and the Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that they need to make up about 40 percent of enrollment in the new health program to balance out the higher costs of insuring older, sicker people.

David Bransfield is among those trying to track down the young and uninsured. Armed with an Apple laptop and a pile of fliers, Bransfield sets up a table nearly every day in the lobby of a University of the District of Columbia classroom building.

“Do you guys have health insurance?” Bransfield asks each time a group of college students passes by. Some nod yes. A few promise to stop back after class. Others don’t bother removing their headphones.

Less than two months before the March 31 sign-up deadline, the administration is lagging behind in meeting its goal. Young adults made up about one-fourth of the 2.2 million people who enrolled in the exchanges through December, the last time the administration released demographic data.

Officials announced in mid-January that 3 million people had enrolled in insurance plans, but officials didn’t update demographic details.

Critics of the law say young people were most likely to be turned off by the technical problems that marred the first two months of online sign-ups. They also say some young people will opt to pay the penalty for not enrolling — $95, or 1 percent of income, whichever is higher — rather than pay more for coverage.

White House officials have minimized the slow enrollment by young people, saying they always expected those in their 20s and 30s to enroll toward the end of the sign-up period.

Megan Chapman is among the holdouts. The 23-year-old college student from High Point, N.C., has been without health insurance for several years. She’s been thinking about signing up through the new federal marketplace but said she’s heard conflicting information about the costs, prompting her to do more research.

“It just depends on the price and how much financial aid I can get,” said Chapman, as she worked in the Guilford Technical Community College cafeteria in Jamestown, N.C. “I’m unemployed. I can’t pay a whole lot of money.”

As Chapman studied, a volunteer from Enroll America was going from table to table in the cafeteria, encouraging uninsured students to sign up. The volunteer, retired dentist Benjamin Williams, 75, didn’t persuade Chapman to enroll, but he did get her to sign a card arranging a follow-up phone call to answer her health care questions.

With Chapman’s personal information now in Enroll America’s system, volunteers will almost certainly keep tabs on her enrollment status through March 31, mirroring the way the Obama campaign tracked likely Democratic voters.

Unlike the political campaign, in which staffers relied on voting records to track possible supporters, there’s no ready-made list of the uninsured. So Marlon Marshall, a campaign veteran who now oversees health care outreach efforts for the White House, said the key for finding potential enrollees is to “meet them where they’re at.”

The approach worked for Philippe Komongnan, 27, a student at the University of the District of Columbia.

Komongnan thought he had health insurance, but when a bad ear infection brought him to the emergency room last year, he was told he no longer had coverage. Because his school requires students to have insurance, he had to sign up for coverage through the college that costs nearly $700 per semester.

Then Komongnan started noticing a health care display in the lobby of his classroom building, the one where Bransfield works most days. After a couple of conversations, Bransfield plugged Komongnan’s information into Washington’s health care website and discovered that he qualified for Medicaid, which has been expanded under the new law.

While Komongnan’s costs will drop dramatically, he doesn’t count toward the pool of young and healthy people the White House is courting because he’s getting coverage through Medicaid, not the new private marketplace.

Bransfield works for the aptly named organization Young Invincibles and is helping enroll people in DC Health Link, the insurance exchange in Washington. He said signing up young people takes patience, given that most are buying insurance on their own for the first time. The process can sometimes take weeks, he said, as people collect the information they need to enroll or weigh the options available to them.

But the deadline has increased the pressure on Bransfield to get the students through the system faster.

“We’re trying to make sure it feels urgent,” he said.

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Associated Press writer Skip Foreman in Jamestown, N.C., contributed to this report.

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