One-third of the people who’ve chosen health-care plans on the
federal health-insurance exchange have, unbeknownst to them, had
something gone wrong with their enrollment, according to the Washington Post.
Their errors with these “834 reports,” the information transmitted to
insurers once people pick plans, “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.”
Insurers
have been complaining since the site launched about these problems. If
they go unresolved, it’s a big problem for consumers, too: Insurance
companies won’t be able to mail them bills for their new plans, and
unless they’ve paid by January 1, they won’t have coverage starting that
day (when many pre-Obamacare individual-market plans expire).
Some of the errors were user-generated, according to one
administration official. On the upside, 149,000 people have enrolled in
plans using the system, according to an internal report published on
Monday — up from 27,000 enrollments on the federal exchange by the end
of October (and compared with something like 4 to 5 million enrollees
the White House was expecting from the states using the federal
exchange).
The White House takes issue with the assessment of error rates,
saying it “doesn’t accurately reflect the picture of what’s happening
right now” and assuring the Post, “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.” A spokesman
today said that many of the errors in enrollments were attributed to a
few specific bugs, such as one that prevented Social Security numbers
from being included when someone enrolled, which has been fixed. One way
of fixing existing broken reports involved “reconciliation” of data
among insurance carriers and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid
Services, which is running the federal website, but that
function doesn’t exist yet.
(Click link below to read more)
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Tuesday, December 3, 2013
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