As Clock Ticks Down To Enrollment Season’s Close, Federal Call Center Wait Times Increase

USA Today: Tax Credits Cut Average ACA Premiums To $105
Less than a week before Obamacare enrollment closes Feb. 15, federal regulators said Monday that the average monthly premium after tax credits ranges from $47 in Mississippi to $172 in New Jersey. The new push for enrollment comes as wait times for the federal call centers increase despite 40 percent more workers taking calls for healthcare.gov, which has about 14,000 call center employees this week. Waits at the end of January averaged 2 1/2 minutes; midafternoon waits Monday were closer to 15 to 20 minutes. (O'Donnell, 2/10)

Los Angeles Times: New Obamacare Enrollment In L.A. County Tops 81,000 As Deadline Nears
More than 81,000 people in Los Angeles County have newly signed up for Obamacare coverage ahead of the Sunday deadline for open enrollment. The pace of enrollment in the L.A. area has slowed considerably from a year ago when 400,889 people signed up during the first six-month enrollment period under the Affordable Care Act. That high turnout surpassed enrollment in most other states last year. (Terhune, 2/9)

NBC News: Community Colleges Push To Enroll Students In Health Insurance
Miami Dade College (which has the largest student enrollment in the country), as well as other community colleges throughout the nation are pushing for students to enroll in health care because they see a link between health insurance and maintaining students in college and actually graduating. (Sesin, 2/9)

NPR: Insurers And Austin Mayor Promote Obamacare To Texas Latinos
More than 900,000 Texans have signed up for health insurance so far this year – about 200,000 more than last year. The deadline for signing up for a health plan on healthcare.gov is Saturday, and some groups in south Texas are making a big push to get Latinos to enroll. (Zaragovia, 2/10)

NBC News: Texas Groups Push To Enroll Latinos Before Health Insurance Deadline
In Texas, roughly 740,000 people enrolled in the federal insurance marketplace during the first go-round. And in Travis County, which encompasses the booming Texas capital, about 40,000 people enrolled. But Latinos didn't benefit to the extent others did; only about 10,000 were Latino, according to Frank Rodriguez, director of the Latino HealthCare Forum (Castillo, 2/10).

Meanwhile, news outlets also report on these insurance marketplace developments -

The Seattle Times: Tax Forms Mean New Troubles For Health Care Exchange
Washington’s health insurance exchange last week began sending out federal tax forms, and that has a created a new set of challenges to sort out. The exchange has mailed documents called 1095-A forms to most of its 130,000 customer accounts, and the form is also supposed to be available through customers’ online accounts. However, some customers are finding that they’re unable to view the forms through Washington Healthplanfinder and exchange officials say they’re working with their contractor, Deloitte, to fix the situation. (Stiffler, 2/9)

Kaiser Health News: UnitedHealthcare’s Efforts To Join California Marketplace Meet Resistance
UnitedHealthcare can’t have its cake and eat it too. That’s the message from the California health insurance marketplace, which turned aside a request from the nation’s largest health insurer to sell statewide on the exchange because it opted not to join when the effort was getting off the ground in 2014. California is one of a handful of states that adopted policies to encourage insurers to participate in the marketplace by creating waiting periods of up to three years if insurers didn’t participate the first year. Among the others is New York, Oregon, Colorado and New Mexico, according to a study conducted by researchers at Georgetown University for the Commonwealth Fund. (Andrews, 2/10)