Obama Pushes Back 2015 Health Care Enrollment

The Obama administration plans to push back the start of next year's ObamaCare enrollment period by a month, from Oct. 15, 2014 to Nov. 15—which would just happen to push it to after the midterm elections, Bloomberg reports. The idea, ostensibly, is to give insurers more time to evaluate the effects of the government-run exchanges, in the hope that doing so will prevent prices from spiking. Right now, the technical stink around the law has prevented it from attracting the kind of desirable enrollees who'll keep rates down.

Most of those young, healthy buyers, will probably start showing up in March—which is when the mandate deadline kicks in, and the uninsured will have to pay a fine, says one MIT economist who helped design the law. The administration wants to give insurers as much time as possible to absorb the impact of that influx, worrying that otherwise rates will spike in the program's second year. "It's in the nation's interest they get time to make those decisions," the economist says. (More Affordable Care Act stories.)