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Federal officials said Monday that if uninsured people don’t obtain coverage within the health law’s official enrollment period, which ends Jan. 31, they won’t get an extension to avoid the law’s penalty for going without insurance this time around. Earlier this year, the Obama administration offered uninsured people a reprieve if they missed the sign-up deadline for 2015 coverage, originally set at Feb. 15. People were given through April to sign up if they said they had learned about the penalty for going uninsured only when they filed their taxes. (Radnofsky, 12/7)

For the fourth straight year fewer Americans are struggling to pay medical bills, according to a major government survey released Tuesday. Most of the progress has come among low-income people and those with government coverage. The data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that the number of people in households that faced problems paying medical bills decreased by 12 million from the first half of 2011 through the first six months of this year. (Alonso-Zaldivar, 12/8)

The woman in charge of Barack Obama’s health-care overhaul is counting down the days: She has 414 to go in the Obama administration. Sylvia Mathews Burwell, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, is trying to cram in what she can, while she can, as she works to secure the fate of the president’s signature domestic policy accomplishment, the Affordable Care Act. (Tracer and Winkler, 12/5)

Cigna CEO David Cordani says the individual market created by the 2010 health law would be better off if insurers were given more flexibility in designing coverage, as well as a more compressed, focused open enrollment period. Kaiser Health News staff writer Julie Appleby discussed this and a range of other ideas with him. (Appleby, 12/7)