HealthCare.gov managers want consumers to give the enrollment system another chance.
The team at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services in charge of fixing the problem-plagued exchange site believes the site is now working reasonably well, Julie Bataille, a CMS rep, said Tuesday during a media conference call.
CMS will be sending e-mails to 275,000 consumers who’ve gotten stuck at some point in the application process after Oct. 1, Battaille said.
The notices will encourage consumers to return to HealthCare.gov to complete the application process.
The e-mails will go out in waves to avoid the possibility all 275,000 consumers return at once and potentially crash the site all over again, Bataille said.
Bataille said HealthCare.gov managers also have made other changes, including a problem tracking system and a feature that lets brokers add unique identifier codes to applications.
Bataille said CMS is also working on posting HealthCare.gov activity figures by the end of the week.
She declined to comment on Wall Street Journal estimates that fewer than 50,000 people have used the HealthCare.gov system to formally enroll in private Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act exchange health plans.
The Washington Post suggested CMS will use the number of applications completed to measure activity rather than the number of completed enrollment transactions.
Bataille noted that payments for coverage that starts Jan. 1 aren’t due yet, and that some people may have completed every part of the enrollment process except for paying for coverage.
Complete your profile to continue reading and get FREE access to BenefitsPRO, part of your ALM digital membership.
Your access to unlimited BenefitsPRO content isn’t changing.
Once you are an ALM digital member, you’ll receive:
- Breaking benefits news and analysis, on-site and via our newsletters and custom alerts
- Educational webcasts, white papers, and ebooks from industry thought leaders
- Critical converage of the property casualty insurance and financial advisory markets on our other ALM sites, PropertyCasualty360 and ThinkAdvisor
Already have an account? Sign In Now
© 2024 ALM Global, LLC, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to [email protected]. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.
Allison Bell
Allison Bell, a senior reporter at ThinkAdvisor and BenefitsPRO, previously was an associate editor at National Underwriter Life & Health. She has a bachelor's degree in economics from Washington University in St. Louis and a master's degree in journalism from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. She can be reached through X at @Think_Allison.
