Stay tuned in to our local news coverage: Listen to 90.7 WMFE on your FM or HD radio, the WMFE mobile app or your smart speaker — say “Alexa, play NPR” and you’ll be connected.

The Trump administration is extending open enrollment to buy health insurance through the federal health insurance exchanges.

The new deadline is 3 a.m. eastern time December 18.

Seema Verma, the head of the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, tweeted that more than 500,000 people were able to finish enrollment on Sunday alone. But some consumers were asked to leave a name and number at the call center.

Verma said the extension was done in an abundance of caution.

In an abundance of caution, to accommodate consumers who during the final hours of Open Enrollment may have experienced issues, starting at 3 pm ET today, we are extending the deadline to sign up for January 1 coverage until 3 am ET December 18. https://t.co/zNNxtNoAMb

— Administrator Seema Verma (@SeemaCMS) December 16, 2019

Christie DeNave is the spokeswoman for Florida Blue, the largest insurer in Florida. She said regardless of the reason why, the insurance company is excited to have the extra 36 hours of enrollment time.

“We definitely find that there’s a lot of people that wait for the last minute no matter what, so some of them may have let these deadlines slip past them,” DeNave said. “We did experience a heavy rush over the weekend, like we do every year at the end of open enrollment. But we didn’t have any issues with actually getting people signed up. So we were a little surprised to hear that there may have been some problems, perhaps in other areas.”

The average premium under the Affordable Care Act in Florida is about $600 a month for a silver plan, but there are subsidies for people making less than $50,000 per year. That means an individual in Orange County making $27,000 annually would pay about $180 per month after subsidies.

A recent report from Kaiser Family Foundation that found nearly 695,000 Floridians who currently don’t have health insurance could get the cheapest Affordable Care Act plan for free after subsidies.

WMFE is a partner with Health News Florida, a statewide collaborative reporting on health care.

Health reporting on WMFE is supported in part by AdventHealth.