Insurers Say Obamacare Website Problems Remain

Over the weekend, the Obama administration

said that as many as 15,000 Obamacare sign ups never actually
made it all the way to health insurers. As J.D. Tuccille
noted yesterday, these were people who had made it all the way
through the website gauntlet during the first two months, when the
system was practically impenetrable.

The administration isn’t exactly eager to focus on the fact that
thousands of people’s applications simply got lost in the shuffle.
But it is trying to highlight the improvements it says it has made
to the system. When the exchanges launched in October, roughly 10
percent of completed sign-ups got lost. Now the administration says
that figure is less than 1 percent.

That’s an improvement, of course. But if the administration is
still expecting to enroll millions of people in private coverage
through the law, a 1 percent error rate will still leave a
non-trivial number of individuals lost in transmission.

Missing files aren’t the only problem to plague the data
transfer process either. Many of the applications are being
transmitted, but with inaccurate data. Insurance industry sources

tell The New York Times that those problems still
remain—and that the administration is overstating the progress
that’s been made:

Insurers said that they had found many discrepancies and errors
and that the government was overstating the improvements
in HealthCare.gov.

In some instances, they said, the federal government reported
that the home address for a new policyholder was outside an
insurer’s service area. In other cases, a child was listed as the
main subscriber — the person responsible for paying premiums — and
parents were listed as dependents.

In some cases, children were enrolled in a policy by the federal
government and parents were left off, or vice versa. In other
cases, the government mixed up the members of a family: A child or
spouse was listed two or three times in the same application in
late November. Such errors can have financial implications,
increasing the amount of premiums that a family is required to
pay.

While some of the problems were discovered in the last few days,
insurers said that they had previously reported many of the errors
to the “help desk” at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid
Services, and that the problems remained unresolved.

 The help desk doesn’t sound all that helpful.