Posted on 01/09/2014 2:38:03 PM PST by SeekAndFind
Is this the first moderately big tremor for O-Care on the news wires this year or did I miss something earlier? It’s been so cold in most of the country, I imagine some significant number of new enrollees decided to put off their first doctor’s appointment, which means few cases so far of people discovering technical snafus that have left them in government/insurer limbo.
But now things are warming up.
Insurance companies are still trying to sort out cases of so-called health insurance orphans, customers for whom the government has a record that they enrolled, but the insurer does not. They are worried the process will grow more cumbersome as they deal with the flood of new customers who signed up in December as enrollment deadlines neared.
The government says the problem is real but under control. Officials say the total number of problem cases they are trying to resolve with insurers currently stands at about 13,000. That includes orphan records. More than 1 million people have signed up through the federal insurance market that serves 36 states. Officials contend the error rate for new signups is close to zero.
Insurers, however, are less enthusiastic about the pace of the fixes. The companies also are seeing cases in which the government has assigned the same identification number to more than one person, as well as so-called “ghost” files in which the insurer has an enrollment record but the government does not.
But orphaned files — when the insurer has no record of enrollment — are particularly concerning because the companies have no automated way to identify the presumed policyholder. They say they have to manually compare the lists of enrollees the government sends them with their own records because the government never built an automated system that would do the work much faster.
The key word in the boldfaced bit above is “currently.” The fact that the industry’s still “deal[ing] with the flood of new customers who signed up in December” means there’s no way to really know just how many “orphaned files” — or ghost files, or files with the same ID number — there’ll be. That’s what Obama and Sebelius bought for themselves when they started moving deadlines deeper into December to help boost the monthly sign-up numbers for PR purposes. The less time insurers had last month to process new applications, the more uncertainty there’d be this month as they raced to catch up. Now they’ve got thousands of phantom sign-ups to chase down while claims have already begun to trickle in. All of the deadline-shifting was premised on the idea that Healthcare.gov was more or less fixed, which meant the industry would be able to handle applications expeditiously. Not so. In his last blog post of 2013, Bob Laszewski wrote on December 29th that “very serious back-end issues” are still plaguing the site. He’s the guy who warned from the beginning, in fact, that if HHS fixed the front end to make mass enrollment possible without first fixing the back end to make sure that insurers would get accurate enrollment information, we’d end up with a giant clusterfark of insurers trying to correct glitchy applications at the same time they’re busy fielding claims from new enrollees. This AP story is the first rumblings of that problem. (Laszewski himself is quoted in it, predicting that it’ll become a bigger one as the month wears on.)
But that’s not the only issue. Orphaned files might be the most Kafkaesque logistical headache facing the industry but there are surely more new enrollees who haven’t paid their first month’s premium yet than there are “orphans.” I haven’t seen recent data on that but several big names, including Blue Cross Blue Shield in Texas and Illinois, announced today that they’re extending the deadline for payment from January 10th all the way to January 30th. That can only mean, I take it, that the rate of nonpayment in some plans is significant enough that insurers feel they have no choice but to extend the grace period. The alternative is to void coverage, which is something they’re loath to do to a big bunch of new customers who might seek coverage elsewhere if they’re tossed. As it is, some new enrollees this month will end up incurring expensive new treatments and then cut a check on January 30th to have their new insurer cover them retroactively. That gives you an inkling of how chaotic things must be right now within the industry.
More Craptacular by the day
I’ll bet the insurers don’t have any money from them, either.
I can’t wait to hear the moaning and whining when they actually try to use this “affordable insurance”. I worked with a guy from Canada, and he was beyond shocked that he was able to get an MRI the next day here, where he would have normally waited months back in Canada.
Don’t worry, it won’t be long until the Canadian-US healthcare response delay is harmonized. And then we can all wait.
You’d find their records next to Barry O’Bama’s birfcertificate.
ObamaCare Orphans. Pass it on.
My niece paid in cash for an MRI “after hours” and was able to get it for about $400.
If she had used insurance, they would have charged the insurance company a lot more.
I'll see your craptacular and raise you to douchetastic.
I never use the d-word.
“My niece paid in cash for an MRI “after hours” and was able to get it for about $400.”
MidNite MRI!
Who gets the lawsuits when someone is denied the coverage they needed to avoid dire consequences?
can’t sue the government.
It will be just like when the EBT cards did not work. Free passes will be given as they will be expected and demanded. How convenient for the vote purchaser president.
The first "deep pocket" the attorneys will find is the unsuspecting ignorant licensed insurance agent's professional liability insurance since he got "certified" so as to enroll unsuspecting ignorant low information voters in a national nitemare!!!
These poor agents would have been much smarter to only offer to enroll those who neither need, nor want a public assistance premium subsidy found only in states or the federal enrollment websites for ObominationCare.gov and rather go directly to the health insurance carrier for a compliant policy and bypass this whole mess!!!
It seems the insurance companies (some of them) are extending payment deadlines to the end of January. Why would they do that? I’m betting lots and lots and lots of folks haven’t paid that very first premium. Then, how many of these folks will pay after that when, insurance card in hand, they head off for the doctor thinking happily about all that “free” care they’re going to be getting, only to find out the meaning of the word “deductible” first hand. I suspect a lot of premium payments will lapse after the first doctor visit.
If anyone has the inside track on "single payer", it's the companies that are in synchronous goose-step mode for obama.
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