Allahpundit:
Is this the first moderately big tremor for O-Care on the news wires this year or did I miss something earlier? It’s been so cold in most of the country, I imagine some significant number of new enrollees decided to put off their first doctor’s appointment, which means few cases so far of people discovering technical snafus that have left them in government/insurer limbo.
But now things are warming up.
Insurance companies are still trying to sort out cases of so-called health insurance orphans, customers for whom the government has a record that they enrolled, but the insurer does not. They are worried the process will grow more cumbersome as they deal with the flood of new customers who signed up in December as enrollment deadlines neared.
The government says the problem is real but under control. Officials saythe total number of problem cases they are trying to resolve with insurers currently stands at about 13,000. That includes orphan records. More than 1 million people have signed up through the federal insurance market that serves 36 states. Officials contend the error rate for new signups is close to zero.
Insurers, however, are less enthusiastic about the pace of the fixes. The companies also are seeing cases in which the government has assigned the same identification number to more than one person, as well as so-called “ghost” files in which the insurer has an enrollment record but the government does not.
But orphaned files — when the insurer has no record of enrollment — are particularly concerning because the companies have no automated way to identify the presumed policyholder. They say they have to manually compare the lists of enrollees the government sends them with their own records because the government never built an automated system that would do the work much faster.
The key word in the boldfaced bit above is “currently.” The fact that the industry’s still “deal[ing] with the flood of new customers who signed up in December” means there’s no way to really know just how many “orphaned files” — or ghost files, or files with the same ID number — there’ll be. That’s what Obama and Sebelius bought for themselves when they started moving deadlines deeper into December to help boost the monthly sign-up numbers for PR purposes. The less time insurers had last month to process new applications, the more uncertainty there’d be this month as they raced to catch up. Now they’ve got thousands of phantom sign-ups to chase down while claims have already begun to trickle in. All of the deadline-shifting was premised on the idea that Healthcare.gov was more or less fixed, which meant the industry would be able to handle applications expeditiously. Not so. In his last blog post of 2013, Bob Laszewski wrote on December 29th that “very serious back-end issues” are still plaguing the site. He’s the guy who warned from the beginning, in fact, that if HHS fixed the front end to make mass enrollment possible without first fixing the back end to make sure that insurers would get accurate enrollment information, we’d end up with a giant clusterfark of insurers trying to correct glitchy applications at the same time they’re busy fielding claims from new enrollees. This AP story is the first rumblings of that problem. (Laszewski himself is quoted in it, predicting that it’ll become a bigger one as the month wears on.)
Must be like some of the non-existant voters for BHO.
This whole thing brings to mind that series of photos of a VA office literally unsafe from the weight of backlogged veteran requests for medical care.
Those files fill all the file cabinets in the rooms AND sit on top of every one of them AND fill the floors so that the workers have to just pick up files near the doors because they can’t get into the rooms!
Looks like ObamaCare will soon have rooms looking like those.