Forget the Obamacare website, the real crisis is with the insurers

Presumably, the healthcare.gov website will be more or less operational after a few months. But that's not even the biggest problem with the program.

Insurers are getting bad information from the enrollments. The federal data hub that is supposed to tell consumers how much of a subsidy they will get is so dysfunctional that insurers have no confidence in the data. And come January 1, insurers believe there will be lots of outraged consumers who were misquoted on coverage and cost.

Washington Examiner:

Affirming what health industry consultant Bob Laszewski has written, my source said that insurers have received a relatively small trickle of enrollments through the federal website, but they are seeing problems.

Duplicate enrollments are a recurring issue. This means that the insurer is notified that somebody has enrolled in an insurance policy through the government exchange, but then receives another notice that the same person has un-enrolled, followed still later by another one that they re-enrolled, and so on.

As of now, it's unclear whether this duplication problem is triggered by a failure in the way Healthcare.gov interacts with the systems of insurers, or if shoppers on the federal exchange are enrolling and un-enrolling themselves as they go through the selection process. Insurers can't ascertain the ultimate choice of the shopper because there are no time stamps attached to transactions on the site.

Other potential challenges involve whether the website will be able to properly communicate with a massive federal data hub to verify applicants' income accurately, calculate subsidies they may be entitled to under the law, and display the correct plan price.

There's also a question of whether the federal website is properly displaying information about plan deductibles, co-payments, and benefits.

Via American Thinker
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