Big new ObamaCare glitch: Insurance companies receiving incomplete data on applicants fm website

Allahpundit:

Result: Even people who think they’ve signed up for insurance might not actually be signed up. Imagine their confusion when January rolls around and their insurance card still hasn’t come in the mail yet.

Jonah Goldberg made a good point on Twitter this a.m. Is it still fair to blame all of this on “glitches”? A “glitch” is when your taillight doesn’t work. When your brakes fail and you go careening off the overpass, that’s more what we’d call a “catastrophic failure.”

While it’s not clear how widespread the problem is, the reports from industry consultants are the first hint that the technical troubles faced by consumers trying to enroll in health plans under the Affordable Care Act may also be hitting the insurers. The companies are receiving electronic files that can’t open or have so much missing information on new enrollees they’re unusable, the consultants said.

Some insurers have been forced to fix entries by hand, said Bob Laszewski, an insurance-industry consultant based in Arlington, Virginia.

“If we don’t see substantial improvement by the end of this week, then I would throw up the yellow flag,” said Dan Schuyler, a consultant advising states and insurers on the exchanges. “If we don’t see it in the next two to three weeks, it’s time for red flags. The concern is some people could get to Jan. 1, and not have coverage.”…

“If you’ve only got a dozen bad enrollments, that’s OK, but what are you going to do when you have 200,000 bad enrollments?” Laszewski said. “What we’re seeing in public is the web portal, which is a mess. It is just as bad behind the wizard’s curtain.”

The more time insurers have to spend cleaning up incomplete data, the more of a backlog there’ll be in processing applications and activating coverage. And that assumes that all applications are amenable to clean-up. What happens to the people who’ve been told by healthcare.gov that their application’s been received and their data ends up being so badly mangled that the insurance company can’t even identify them conclusively to contact them? This was the point of yesterday’s post. Right now the feds are telling the media that the big problems with the website are scalability and coding errors in the sign-up process, but there’s no sound reason to believe that’s true. It may be true that errors in sign-up coding are the biggest problem they’re aware of, but it’s almost impossible to believe that, given their haplessness in getting the sign-up process to run smoothly, the more advanced functions of the site will run like clockwork once they iron out this initial wrinkle. And so the countdown begins: How long before HHS has to swallow its pride and add a huge warning to the healthcare.gov homepage encouraging people to sign up by phone rather than use the site? (The contact number is already there but on an inner page, which you need to look for.) And how long will that process take between long wait times on the phone and the logistical burden of having federal bureaucrats process applications and calculate subsidies instead of the machine?

They had three years to figure this out. In theory, I mean; in practice, as Megan McArdle notes, they let half of that time expire before getting cracking on building the exchanges. A brilliant kid can wait until the last minute and still ace a complex school project, but we’re not governed by brilliant kids:

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