The window to sign up for health insurance through California’s state marketplace, Covered California , ends Friday at midnight.
The window for new customers was originally slated to close on Jan. 31, but the state exchange said that it decided to extend the deadline to Feb. 9 given the large volume of demand and a cybersecurity incident earlier in the month that affected customer service call centers.
Since the insurance exchange was created in 2010, it has allowed Californians to sign up for subsidized or no-cost healthcare plans, either with insurers such as Kaiser Permanente, Molina Healthcare and Anthem Blue Cross, or with Medi-Cal, the state Medicaid program for low-income residents. More than 1.77 million Californians were enrolled in a Covered California plan as of Jan. 31. Last year, 469,000 of those enrollees were in Los Angeles county alone.