Not an ideal beginning for Health Insurance Exchanges

The response provided to the much awaited health insurance exchanges seems to have been overwhelming with a large number of consumers showing interest in registering themselves and searching for best available plans. The unfortunate part has been that the info systems expected to handle the transactions have failed to deliver. The opening day of health insurance marketplace was marked with delays and server crashes. Technical issues have resulted in preventing consumers from signing up online and looking up for plan information. One obvious cause has been the inability of these sites to handle such large number of parallel transactions. In most cases the platforms are not robustly built to handle online traffic as huge as is coming their way. Consumers, in the meantime, have been urged to follow the old fashioned way of buying plans either over telephone or in person. Only the waiting time is expected to go up till the online registration part is not handled.

 

The insurers on their part have been caught in a web of uncertainty. They do not have much information about how many enrollments will they have to deal with eventually. Insurers are used to handling batches of electronic data sent across to them. But it becomes difficult to handle them when they are corrupt or incomplete. This is precisely what is happening right now. Technical issues having been dogging the federal run health exchanges. This has resulted in faulty or incomplete data being shared from their end with insurers. In some cases, the files shared do not open or are in a state where they cannot be used further. As a quick fix, they have resorted to manually correcting the errors and processing them. But such a thing will not be possible as one approaches the enrollment deadline - which was earlier scheduled on 15th of Dec 2013. With millions of people expected to sign up for the program, handling all the incorrect files will be next to impossible. The problem is not only with the federal run exchanges but with the state run ones too.

 

All this has resulted in the exchanges unable to share exact enrollment statistics as of date. Inspite of all the chaos which exists, the insurers do not want miss out on the opportunity and have taken it upon themselves to market their offerings to the people. They clearly see a lot of scope for generating business from the population which would be taking up insurance coverage for the first time. Thus they are not waiting for the states to educate people and are launching their own marketing campaigns. Since it has started to sink in that that the systems will take a bit to time to start running optimally, they are actively pursuing channels by which they can reach out to consumers’ offline. For example one such channel successfully deployed is to send out emails to small business concerns which can provide multiple pools of subscribers at one go and urge them to ahead with the traditional method.

 

In the meantime, the government is trying its best to solve the technical problems which have caused this clutter. It has put together a team comprising of people of very high repute to look into the matter with outmost urgency. But the unfortunate part has been that, inspite of working 24x7, new issues have cropped up on an ongoing basis and have resulted in preventing consumers from accessing the market places online. Overall, the federal website HealthCare.gov seems to have the following major problems:

  • Confusing prompts

  • Overwhelming amount of information provided out of context

  • Forms taking too much of time load

  • Design Flaws in architecture

As per the earlier mandate, consumers had to apply for insurance coverage by 15th of Dec 2013 and start getting covered by the 1st of Jan 2014. But the unexpected turn of events; driven by technical issues of gigantic proportions has compelled the deadline to be pushed to Mar 31st 2014. This will serve as a breather for people and ease out the process of registration.

 

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