CA: State insurance chief faults health exchange for cancellations

Stepping into the national backlash over health policy cancellations, California Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones faulted the state's health exchange for requiring insurers to terminate coverage Dec. 31, but acknowledged that he has little power to stop it.

Jones reiterated his support for President Obama'shealthcare law Tuesday, but he said these cancellation notices and the resulting avalanche of consumer complaints were an unnecessary blunder.

"There are areas where implementation could be done better, and this is an example of that," Jones said. "Individuals could have been allowed to stay in their plan for another year. Don't force people out arbitrarily Dec. 31."

With that in mind, Jones said he pressured Blue Shield of California to offer an extension until March 31 to about 113,000 customers. Their policies were being canceled Dec. 31 because their coverage doesn't meet all the requirements of the Affordable Care Act.

Overall, an estimated 1 million Californians with individual health insurance have received termination letters in recent weeks. They are among several million people affected nationwide.

Covered California, the state insurance exchange, estimates that nearly 600,000 of those customers getting cancellation notices may see higher rates next year while also benefiting from more comprehensive coverage.

Jones said Blue Shield failed to give the affected customers adequate notice of the change. State regulators will scrutinize cancellation notices from other companies, Jones said, but he downplayed the idea that other insurers will be forced to make similar moves.

Via: LA Times

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You Also Can't Keep Your Doctor I had great cancer doctors and health insurance.My plan was cancelled. Now I worry how long I'll live.

Everyone now is clamoring about Affordable Care Act winners and losers. I am one of the losers.

My grievance is not political; all my energies are directed to enjoying life and staying alive, and I have no time for politics. For almost seven years I have fought and survived stage-4 gallbladder cancer, with a five-year survival rate of less than 2% after diagnosis. I am a determined fighter and extremely lucky. But this luck may have just run out: My affordable, lifesaving medical insurance policy has been canceled effective Dec. 31.

My choice is to get coverage through the government health exchange and lose access to my cancer doctors, or pay much more for insurance outside the exchange (the quotes average 40% to 50% more) for the privilege of starting over with an unfamiliar insurance company and impaired benefits.

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Bloomberg News

Countless hours searching for non-exchange plans have uncovered nothing that compares well with my existing coverage. But the greatest source of frustration is Covered California, the state's Affordable Care Act health-insurance exchange and, by some reports, one of the best such exchanges in the country. After four weeks of researching plans on the website, talking directly to government exchange counselors, insurance companies and medical providers, my insurance broker and I are as confused as ever. Time is running out and we still don't have a clue how to best proceed.

Two things have been essential in my fight to survive stage-4 cancer. The first are doctors and health teams in California and Texas: at the medical center of the University of California, San Diego, and its Moores Cancer Center; Stanford University's Cancer Institute; and the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

The second element essential to my fight is a United Healthcare PPO (preferred provider organization) health-insurance policy.

Since March 2007 United Healthcare has paid $1.2 million to help keep me alive, and it has never once questioned any treatment or procedure recommended by my medical team. The company pays a fair price to the doctors and hospitals, on time, and is responsive to the emergency treatment requirements of late-stage cancer. Its caring people in the claims office have been readily available to talk to me and my providers.

But in January, United Healthcare sent me a letter announcing that they were pulling out of the individual California market. The company suggested I look to Covered California starting in October.

Via: WSJ

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YOUR STORIES: Insurance Plans Cancelled Due to Obamacare

Estimates this week suggest that 11 million people could lose their current insurance plans because of Obamacare’s mandatory requirements. We knew that included many Heritage readers, so earlier this week we asked: Has your health insurance plan been canceled?

Here are some of your stories:

  

John B:

IL family of 4. Both parents & a 23 yr. old canceled. We’re scrambling to replace coverage by Jan. 1st at a 80% increase in premiums. Washington, you’re killing us out here.

Via: The Foundry

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Covered California Rollout Also Suffers Glitches

“To those who’ve worried, suffered in silence, hoped, and lived in a state of fear: Welcome to a new state of health. Welcome to Covered California, the place to find quality, affordable coverage, financial help for those who need it, and no one can be denied because of a previous condition.”

So advertises a new television commercial for the state’s health insurance exchange, which formally launched on October 1. But while the debut of Covered California hasn’t been as disastrous as the Obama administration’s rollout of HeathCare.gov, the federally-run Obamacare health exchange, it has not been without failings of its own.

Indeed, on launch day, Covered California’s website stalled, with technical issues not unlike the “glitches” — to use President Obama’s description — that that have afflicted the federal government’s health insurance portal from the start.

Revisiting the Covered California website the day after its launch, the Sacramento Bee found that its technical issues remained unresolved.

“A click on the ‘start’ button leads to a page that takes several minutes to load,” the Bee reported. “When the page does load, it’s formatting appears to be faulty, and clicking through to the next step brings additional delays.” So a Bee reporter phoned Covered California’s customer support line, only to be greeted by a recording advising that the wait for service would be longer than 30 minutes.

Three weeks later, CoveredCa.com — the online “marketplace” where those worried, suffering in silence, and hoping for health insurance are supposed to be able to shop for a health plan that offers the benefits desire at the price they can afford — is still plagued with bugs.

Last weekend, the site was taken offline, Covered California officials said, to perform certain unspecified maintenance. And, just this past Wednesday, the website crashed on its own. Callers to Covered California customer support — those who managed to get through — were warned that the outage could last all day and all night.

Meanwhile, there are other major problems with the Covered California web site that deprive those shopping for health insurance of important information they need to make informed decisions.

Via: California Political Review

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900,000 — Not 500,000 — Californians to Lose Health Insurance

My wife, San Francisco Chronicle columnist Debra J. Saunders, caused quite a stirover the weekend when she discovered that 500,000 Californians would lose their health insurance under Obamacare. That means often paying more to buy a new policy, on the exchange.

It’s actually worse than she first thought. At an editorial-board meeting yesterday, she questioned the head of Covered California about the matter. He admitted the actual number is between 800,00 and 900,000.

And that got me to thinking about Ross Douthat’s recent blog about Obamacare that I found disturbing because he seemingly accepts the premise that the Technocracy should choose winners and losers:

But not every form of “asking some people to pay more” is created equal. A cap on the tax break for employer-provided health insurance, for instance — which is central to most right-of-center health care proposals, and is taking effect in a more limited way in the form of Obamacare’s so-called “Cadillac tax” on expensive insurance plans — basically asks people who have been getting a very good deal from current health care policy (the well-off and upper middle class, and some union members with generous benefit packages) to live with a somewhat smaller subsidy and somewhat less generous employer coverage going forward. . . .
This policy change isn’t cost free, and it would still violate President Obama’s unwise “if you like your plan, you can keep it” pledge. But it promises to level the health-insurance playing field somewhat while asking the most from those Americans who have benefited from its existing tilt. But “rate shock” seems different, because premium increases in the individual market creates a set of Obamacare losers within a group of people who weren’t obviously winners to begin with.

Via: NRO
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Doctor search tool still not working on Covered California website

A highly-touted  doctor search tool on the Covered California health insurance website has so far  proven  to be nothing but headaches for consumers and for officials of the state run insurance marketplace, who have  taken the feature offline for repairs. 

During the first week of enrollment that started Oct. 1, the doctor search didn’t work at all. Top officials touted it on opening day as an important tool for consumers who want to confirm that their doctor is included in any new health plan they may buy.

Early last week, Covered California officials announced the search tool was up and running.  But, within hours, those using it found a slew of problems. 

"I had an ophthamologist friend listed as speaking Farsi, Russian and Spanish, and he doesn’t speak any of those languages," says Dr. Richard Thorp, president of the California Medical Assn. The group represents about 37,000 doctors statewide. 

Perhaps even more awkward, data loaded into the site contained errors that linked doctors to the wrong specialty.  For instance, Thorp says,  a gynecologist friend of his was listed as an ophthalmologist. 

"You can understand that that’s a very different kind of encounter: thinking you're signing up for an ophthalmologist," he says, "and finding out the doctor you signed up for is an OB/GYN doctor or, visa versa, for that matter.”  

Covered California spokeswoman Anne Gonzales says the agency took the doctor search tool offline last Tuesday  to fix improperly loaded data. The agency is also trying to make the slow-working search run faster and to make the function easier for consumers to find and to use. 

"It’ll have better page loading speed. We’re going to reconfigure some of the navigation paths so it’s not so confusing, and we’ll have some expanded search functions," Gonzales says. Officials hope the search tool will be running by sometime next week. 

In the meantime, some are advising consumers shopping for insurance on the website to hold off on enrolling in a plan until the doctor search is working.

Via: The Right Scoop

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Covered California: Obamacare And Reality Collide

In the midst of a government shutdown, the ACA exchanges open to much fanfare and success. Well, actually, no they didn’t.  CNN and MSNBC tried all day to get them to work and could not sign up on live television. People browsing often couldn’t access the site or proceed through the process.  They tried to blame this on traffic, but even ACA supporters have dismissed this canard.

“I’m a very very big supporter of the health-care act, but I don’t buy the argument that the load was too unexpected.” – Washington Post

But Covered California had 5 million visits. That’s certainly a lot right?

Dana Howard, a spokesman for Covered California, said the error was the result of internal miscommunication. “Someone misspoke and thought it was indeed 5 million hits. That was incorrect,” he said.

Further, it appears that not one person has signed up in the entire state of California.

“Since Obamacare’s exchanges opened, none of the 645,000 people who visited California’s online exchange, coveredca.com, have enrolled in the healthcare program, California news station KUSI-CA reports.”

But you’re a do-it-yourself kind of person, so you want to go and do a rate comparison yourself. According to Covered California, that’s impossible.

The reasoning for this you get to find in the brochure on Covered California’s website.

Apparently it is impossible to compare these rates with rates you could have obtained because — well, because they say so.  It’s not as if someone can’t say “I paid x over the last 3 years, and now I pay y,” but I digress. The truth is that ACA has been designed to fail your average consumer and shift the cost burden to the young and healthy. Insurers, as you can see above, are no longer allowed to set prices based on your risk, but to charge everyone based on the risk level of a much sicker person even if that does not apply to you. The only variables allowed are age and geographic region, which also leads to some odd effects within a single state.  Many are finding that they can get a policy cheaper if they lived in another pricing region. California has 19 pricing regions. Clearly we can’t have interstate competition on insurance plans because that might actually offer consumers competitive choices, and now we can’t even have competition within a state.

Via:Pocket Full Of Liberty

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