To Be Governed
Many consumers who have waited months to resolve insurance application issues on HealthCare.gov are finally getting help, but some are still stuck in limbo without Medicaid or insurance coverage, and many of the site’s most vexing problems remain, according to insurers, brokers and state Medicaid officials. Applications that take days, clueless customer service representatives and error-ridden or orphan files persist. Changes made to the website last week will solve many of these problems, but the fixes were made so quietly that few brokers and consumers were aware of them, says Jessica Waltman, senior vice president of government affairs for the National Association of Health Underwriters, which represents insurance agents and brokers.
Federal officials are “not consistently and clearly communicating what to do to fix tricky enrollment situations, either to affected consumers or to the certified agents and brokers who are trying to help their clients get covered,” Waltman says. (USA Today)
There are people who are obviously motivated to sign up for coverage on the marketplace, but the website and the system is failing them. People are becoming increasingly frustrated with the website, causing them to lose enrollments.
I wonder had healthcare.gov been a successful website from the get go, would more people have signed up, especially among young people. Or would the government have had to inflate their numbers to the public.
There are more factors than just the website that disincentivizes young people from signing up. Most likely high premiums.
The government would’ve just inflated their numbers even higher.
The government probably needs more real CS experts.
“not all the support personnel really have a grasp of what is going on.”
This is not necessarily what you want to hear about your support personnel. They should be there to be knowledgeable and to answer any questions an enrollee may have. Instead, they seem ill-informed.
I have actually called the healthcare.gov support line and they put me on hold until they eventually hung up on me. Real quality service right there.
It’s the government, they don’t need to be service oriented.
The government seems to enjoy the “funny” performance.
I agree the customer service should have been one of the main points of the website. People are making decisions that heavily influence their life, and the vast majority of them don’t know what they were doing. It is a sensitive matter and people deserve that the government provides accurate assistance. The Affordable Care Act was intended to support those in the lower 20 percent, thus it should have been targeted as something that they could fill out without any inconvenience.
It was about time for people to start getting a response from healthcare.gov. It took longer than it should. Open enrollment is almost done, the target number of enrollees has not been met yet and there are “lots” of individuals seeking for insurance coverage. I still cannot believe that the backbone of the most important legislation of this administration is still flawed. It should have been something that worked from the beginning, that offered accurate customer service and that allowed consumers to get the plan they needed.
“I still cannot believe that the backbone of the most important legislation of this administration is still flawed.”
That’s because the legislation was flawed to begin with.
The ability to communicate accurate information is determinant to the success or failure of any government program. The ACA’s major weakness was its webpage. This coupled almost inexistent communication between the government and the people, created the catastrophe that we experience when the webpage was launched. If information were to be widely available the program wouldn’t be as disastrous as it currently is.
With this disastrous government performance so far, how do folks think single payer would be an improvement?