Obamacare Train Wreck: 300K Risk Losing Health Insurance

Toon by William Warren

Within a month, we’ll mark one year since the highly-touted federal Obamacare website opening, which quickly became a debacle. Later this fall, a new open enrollment period will begin. But at the moment, the Obama administration is still struggling with problems from last year’s enrollment period.

USA Today wrote yesterday, “Hundreds of thousands of people risk losing their new health insurance policies if they don't resubmit citizenship or immigration information to the government by the end of next week -- but the federal Healthcare.gov site remains so glitchy that they are having a tough time complying. Consumers are being forced to send their information multiple times, and many can't access their accounts at all, immigration law experts and insurance agents say. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services sent letters to about 310,000 consumers two weeks ago, telling them they need to submit proof of their citizenship or immigration status by Sept. 5 or their insurance will be canceled at the end of the month. . . . Meanwhile, many can't access their accounts. All passwords were changed in April because of a security threat, causing confusion for many consumers. Elizabeth Colvin, director of Insure Central Texas, says many of those her group helped enroll can't reset their passwords because they don't remember their log-in information or security questions. Even if accounts can be opened, documentation often can't be uploaded, Colvin says. When it is, CMS often says it hasn't been received, says insurance agent Ronnell Nolan, who heads Health Agents for America. ‘It's scary because they've sent it in numerous times and different ways, and CMS is saying it doesn't have it,’ says Nolan. ‘What are all those people going to do? It's going to be a mess.’”

Of course, the health care exchanges have already been a mess for many Americans. Earlier this week, Washington Post columnist Robert McCartney wrote about the Obamacare struggles of Diana Daniels, a Harvard-educated lawyer, mother, former general counsel to the corporation that owned The Washington Post, and a current Goldman Sachs employee. “Diana Daniels’s experience with the District’s health insurance Web site is the sort that gives government bureaucracy — and Obamacare — a bad reputation. The Northwest Washington mom filed her online application for medical coverage for her two teenage daughters on June 4. The process supposedly requires three weeks at most. No coverage materialized for nearly three months, despite Daniels’s numerous calls to D.C. Health Link trying to sort things out. Daniels was told in mid-July that her application had been ‘escalated.’ Still, nothing happened. The bureaucrats just kept saying that neither they nor anybody else could help. ‘I was very patient, in my view, and I couldn’t get beyond the people who answer the phone bank,’ said Daniels, who is insured separately. After I inquired about Daniels’s case this week, I was told Wednesday that the glitch had been resolved at the end of last week. CareFirst, the insurance company issuing the policy, phoned Daniels on Wednesday to say the coverage had finally come through. The timing is suspicious, obviously. But I can’t prove the media interest triggered the sudden solution. It doesn’t matter, anyway. There’s no excuse for the delay, which even the exchange’s executive director admitted was ‘completely unacceptable.’ Because of the lag, Daniels was forced to buy a university health policy for her older daughter, Dana, 19. She needed coverage to be permitted to enroll this month for her sophomore year at Cornell.”

“Moreover,” McCartney wrote, “Diana Daniels is hardly the kind of person likely to have trouble handling a computer or navigating a bureaucracy. Daniels, a Harvard-educated lawyer, was general counsel for 19 years of what was then this newspaper’s parent corporation, and she is used to pressing her case in complex negotiations. Currently, she’s a part-time trustee of mutual funds for the blue-chip Wall Street firm Goldman Sachs. So you have to ask: If Diana Daniels can’t get the District’s health Web site to work, then how is an average person supposed to do so? ‘I cannot be the only one in this health-care limbo,’ Daniels said. ‘One wonders how others are coping with this bureaucratic nightmare.’”

Elsewhere in The Post, its technology reporter looks at how much American taxpayers spent and are still spending on just the still problematic federal Obamacare website. “When, in several places, the [Affordable Care Act] called for the creation of an ‘Internet website’ to allow Americans to find and sign up for new health insurance coverage, it opened the tap on hundreds of millions of dollars that would eventually go to creating HealthCare.gov's front end and back end, as well as a small universe of accompanying digital sites. On Wednesday, the office of Daniel Levinson, the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services, put out a report detailing the dozens of contracts that went into building out the Federal Marketplace project. And a look at each in the disaggregate paints a picture of an effort far more sweeping than even that suggested by the half-billion dollars the federal government has already paid out to implement the digital side of the health insurance law.

“So, how do you spend that much money building HealthCare.gov and its companion sites? A few million here, a few hundred thousand there, and eventually it adds up. There were the big ticket items. The long-time government technology vendor CGI Federal picked up a handful of the contracts: $176 million ‘to build the technical solution and support the operations of the Federal Exchange,’ $16 million for ‘Web site development and support services,’ $11 million for setting up ‘the information system to support data collection,’ and nearly $7 million to build and populate the part of the site that allows users to find a health care plan. And $73 million went to fellow major vendor QSSI for setting up the ‘Data Services Hub,’ which identifies whether people qualify for coverage. Another $8.1 million was paid to Booz Allen Hamilton for ‘standing up the Exchange datacenter.’ Some $19 million went to HP Enterprise Services to set up the ‘Virtual Data Center Environment’ the sites would run in, which in turn triggered a $9 million contract to Creative Computing Solutions for securing the cloud-computing aspects of the project, protection that included ‘near-real time global threat intelligence.’ Near the other end of the scale was the $160,000 paid to a company called Blast Design Studio ‘to purchase online marketing consulting services’ for HealthCare.gov, and another $198,000 for Blast to integrate those online marketing efforts with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services' existing Google Analytics deployment.”

The Post report notes, “Levinson's report also reveals that we're not done paying for the Federal Marketplace yet. Bills totaling some $500 million have already been paid, and the federal government has committed to pay some $800 million in total for the project. But add up all the base contracts and option years -- that is, possible extensions of existing contracts that might be necessary to keep the project operational -- and the total shakes out to some $1.7 billion.”

Every week, the Obamacare train wreck continues. And yet Washington Democrats continue to refuse to do anything to repeal or replace this mess that they so proudly created.

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