A sign placed out on the 16th Street Mall beckoned people in late March 2014 to sign up for health insurance through the Affordable Care and Connect for Health Colorado. (Kathryn Scott Osler, The Denver Post)
Brokers and agents in the field continue to report serious problems with online enrollment with Connect for Health Colorado, the state health insurance exchange established under the Affordable Care Act.
Connect for Health officials told The Denver Post they can’t readily track how many people are having problems with the enrollment system, yet some brokers dispute this.
The exchange issues tickets to callers when they can’t fix their problems on the spot. The “trouble tickets,” as brokers call them, start with the date and end with a sequence number, such as 141215-001234. Brokers assume the tickets are issued sequentially — in simple numerical order.
One broker received a a sequence number just under 9000 on Monday, Dec. 15, the deadline for enrolling for coverage effective Jan. 1. On preceding days, the numbers were running in the 3000-4000 range.
“And that’s just for people who had the patience to wait on hold fro most of an hour,” said ACA-certified broker Mike Eubanks, co-owner of Rosita Risk Management LLC in Colorado Springs.
Connect for Health has not yet responded to questions about whether these numbers are issued sequentially or in some or way.
Eubanks, who said he also has been a website developer for a long time, doesn’t find the site even minimally user-friendly.
“We experienced lockups or crashes at more than 10 different points in their systems,” Eubanks said of the merged Connect for Health and Medicaid enrollment portal.
“Hold times on the broker support line regularly ran close to an hour for the last several weeks,” Eubanks said. “The broker support line was periodically down completely, and often dropped calls mid-conversation.”
As The Denver Post heard from a dozen would-be health insurance consumer, the site’s Live Chat function required wait times of more than an hour, he said, and then often ended with a message that no one is available, try back later.
Eubanks said he was told by Connect for Health reps on the phone that about half of all tax-credit calculations coming to them from the Medicaid side, PEAK (Program Eligibility and Application Kit) side were wrong.
“We were told by their phone reps more than once that the changes to the site for this year were done by a college student with little or no real web development experience,” Eubanks said.”So, as I see it, this was a fiasco to rival the federal ACA site last year. Much, much worse than last year (in Colorado).”
And, he said, the “courteous, professional, patient, and clear” reps were the bright spot in the ordeal.
“Last year they told us they had 3,500 brokers registered to do business with Connect for Health,” Eubanks said. “This year, their recording (when on hold) says over 1,500 brokers. We’ll have to wait until next open enrollment to see, but my guess is that the brokers willing to put themselves through this will drop at least in half again.”
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