Obamacare crashes into Romneycare

[FarCenter]

Massachusetts created a Romneycare-inspired template for President Barack Obama’s health reform effort. Now, as the Bay State is struggling to upgrade for the Obamacare era, its enrollment system is buckling under technical glitches like those that hobbled HealthCare.gov.

State officials are increasingly concerned that thousands of Massachusetts residents seeking coverage are lost in a wilderness of misfiled applications and cybermalfunctions. Now, they’re moving ahead with a labor intensive backup plan aimed at making sure that no one loses coverage when Obamacare starts in January.

It’s a story that’s been told in several of the 14 states running their own Obamacare insurance exchanges with one big difference: it wasn’t supposed to happen in the birthplace of health reform.

Massachusetts’s experiment with health reform — led by Gov. Mitt Romney in 2006 — has long been a White House talking point about what America could look like under Obamacare. President Barack Obama flew to Boston in October to reassure the nation that his own health law would turn out just fine, despite its disastrous rollout. Massachusetts built its exchange in 2007, with its own balky rollout, and the state now boasts the country’s lowest uninsurance rate.

That narrative is under threat. Massachusetts is struggling to rebuild its exchange, known as the Connector, to comply with the Affordable Care Act. New federal subsidy levels and broader Medicaid coverage mean that tens of thousands of people have to enroll or re-enroll but are hitting those glitches. That’s led to a blame game.
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Although 95,000 online accounts had been created and 35,000 applications for coverage submitted by Dec. 11, just 1,400 applicants finished the process. It’s unclear how many have paid their first premium. “Given where we are on the timeline, it is evident that we will not be able to leverage the new website and IT system as intended to support enrollment into ACA-compliant coverage for [Jan. 1],” according to a Connector staff report delivered to the agency’s board.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/12/obamacare-romneycare-massachusetts-101311.html#ixzz2ntTk4C7H

[Mass]

1. Yes, it is not really working

and the Connector has not helped by starting telling people on the exchange to re-register in November, whether they were on Medicaid, CHIP, or something else. They later discovered they did not need to (in our case after having filled the 38 pages of the paper application).

At least, in our case, this is solved. We were informed today that everything was done, but nothing was done through the website. The Masshealth phone service (that you need to call if you want subsidies) is very efficient in our experience.