Yesterday I blogged that the next big problem in Obamacare will manifest when people, who thought they signed up correctly, are not signed up correctly.
Now we have some numbers about the error rate:
The enrollment records for a significant portion of the Americans who have chosen health plans through the online federal insurance marketplace contain errors — generated by the computer system — that mean they might not get the coverage they’re expecting next month.
The errors cumulatively have affected roughly one-third of the people who have signed up for health plans since Oct. 1, according to two government and health-care industry officials. The White House disputed the figure but declined to provide its own.
The mistakes include failure to notify insurers about new customers, duplicate enrollments or cancellation notices for the same person, incorrect information about family members, and mistakes involving federal subsidies. The errors have been accumulating since HealthCare.gov opened two months ago, even as the Obama administration has been working to make it easier for consumers to sign up for coverage, the government and industry officials said.
How bad are these errors? Many customers may as well not have signed up. This is pressing, because the mandate will penalize (sorry, tax) those without insurance.
Figuring out how to clean up the backlog of errors and prevent similar ones in the future is emerging as the new imperative if the federal insurance exchange is to work as intended. The problems were the subject of a meeting Monday between administration officials and a new “Payer Exchange Performance Team” made up of insurance industry leaders.
The idea that one-third of the enrollment records are flawed “doesn’t accurately reflect the picture of what’s happening right now,” White House senior communications adviser Tara McGuinness said.
“We’ve got a team of experts already working closely with issuers to make sure that every past and future 834 is accurate. We’re confident they’ll succeed,” McGuinness said. The 834s are nightly enrollment forms sent to insurers to tell them who their new customers are.
Some of the errors in the past forms were generated by the way people were using the system, another senior official on the project said, such as clicking twice on the confirmation button or moving backward and forward on the site.
…
The trading of enrollment records between a small number of insurers and CMS, which is overseeing the Web site, is a precursor to a monthly comparison that is scheduled to begin in mid-December. The part of the online system that is supposed to perform this comparison, known as “reconciliation,” is not yet built, according to government officials.
On Monday, Julie Bataille, a spokeswoman for CMS, recommended that insurance seekers who choose a health plan through the site contact the insurer afterward to make certain they are actually enrolled. “Consumers should absolutely call their selected plan and confirm that they have paid their first month’s premium, and coverage will be available January 1,” she said.
The White House has denied this 1/3 error rate.
Figuring out how to clean up the backlog of errors and prevent similar ones in the future is emerging as the new imperative if the federal insurance exchange is to work as intended. The problems were the subject of a meeting Monday between administration officials and a new “Payer Exchange Performance Team” made up of insurance industry leaders.
The idea that one-third of the enrollment records are flawed “doesn’t accurately reflect the picture of what’s happening right now,” White House senior communications adviser Tara McGuinness said.
“We’ve got a team of experts already working closely with issuers to make sure that every past and future 834 is accurate. We’re confident they’ll succeed,” McGuinness said. The 834s are nightly enrollment forms sent to insurers to tell them who their new customers are.
Some of the errors in the past forms were generated by the way people were using the system, another senior official on the project said, such as clicking twice on the confirmation button or moving backward and forward on the site.
The President should get out in front of this, and say, “If you like your insurance, you can keep it, so long as you properly enrolled online.”