Westhill Consulting Healthcare - A Few Persistent Iowans Manage to Buy Health Insurance On Crash
A few persistent
Iowans manage to buy health insurance on crash-plagued Obamacare exchange
There were at least five strangely determined Iowans have dealt
with signing up for health insurance on the government’s balky new online
marketplace.
They were the Hardy Handful.
It seems that they were eager to wait through endless holdups and to
try, try again after constantly being booted off the system. They had enrolled in insurance plans sold on
the public marketplace by CoOportunity Health.
“They threaded the needle and got in,” said Cliff Gold, the
insurance carrier’s chief operating officer. “It’s like when a radio station
says, ‘If you’re the 20th caller, you’ll win something.’ These people were the
20th caller.”
Two of the unidentified purchasers are from Iowa City, two are
from Glidden and one is from Clive, Gold said.
Also called exchanges, the health-insurance marketplaces are a key
part of the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. Since they opened Oct. 1, they have been
plagued with technical problems. Iowa’s
exchange is using a federal website, healthcare.gov, which has been beset with
delays and crashes. Federal officials
have blamed the glitches on an unexpected surge of millions of consumers trying
to use the system at once. But some
computer experts have said the problems are at least partly due to technical
flaws in the site. Federal officials are
pledging to fix the issues as quickly as possible.
Gold said he is encouraged by the fact that a few people are
getting through. He likened the situation to trying to start a care on a frigid
winter morning. “At first, it just turns over. Then it kicks in,” he said.
“Well, it’s kicked in, but it’s still cold inside the car.”
CoOportunity Health is one of two carriers selling individual
policies throughout Iowa on the new exchange. Gold said the company confirmed today that at
least five Iowans and nine Nebraskans had selected its policies via the new
system. The other statewide Iowa carrier, Coventry, declined to say
whether it had sold any Iowa policies on the new system.
Insurance Commissioner Nick Gerhart said CoOportunity’s news was
encouraging. “Hopefully the system issues will begin to subside as more Iowans
go online to enroll in the coming weeks,” he said.
They are the only place to buy insurance policies that qualify for
new federal subsidies; this is one of the main attractions of the exchanges. The subsidies will aid Americans with moderate
incomes pay premiums. A lot of officials
have been advising consumers to hang around another week or two before trying
to get on the systems, so the bugs can be worked out. Consumers have until Dec. 15 to sign up for
policies that will take effect Jan. 1, and they will have until March 31 to buy
policies that will count toward the new requirement that most Americans obtain
health insurance for 2014.
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