Health-care reporters have been zeroed in lately on the 834 error rate, i.e. the rate of garbled or phantom enrollment data transmitted from Healthcare.gov to insurance companies as people sign up. WaPo claimed the other day that the rate is as high as one-third, but HHS, knowing a looming PR catastrophe when it sees one, has refused to give reporters a hard number. The media’s focus on that is all to the good — the higher the 834 error rate, the more chaos there’ll be next month in sorting out the big surge of applications in December — but there’s another key rate that’s being overlooked. Namely, what’s the rate of people who somehow, miraculously, have completed the sign-up process on Healthcare.gov but then failed to send a payment to their new insurer for their first month of premiums? I haven’t seen a single estimate of that yet even though it’s a crucial metric: If you don’t pay by New Year’s Eve, you’re not enrolled, even if you successfully signed up on the website. If there’s a huge nonpayment rate among new sign-ups, there’ll be a huge number of people who show up to see the doctor next month only to find, to their great confusion and annoyance, that they have no coverage because they haven’t paid yet.
That brings me to this new piece from
CNN Money, from which I learned two important things. One: If you sign up but fail to pay by December 31st, it’s not a simple matter of your coverage being suspended until you pony up. Your enrollment is
void and you have to re-enroll on the website in January. Imagine how well Healthcare.gov is likely to cope if, next month, there are suddenly hundreds of thousands of people flooding into the site trying to sign up again because they forgot to pay on time before. And two: At least one insurer out there
is keeping tabs on its nonpayment rate and sharing that number with the media. And the results are … not good:
While the Obama administration has reported that more than 100,000 Americans picked plans in October, the first month of open enrollment, it’s not known how many of them have paid.
One insurer, Physicians Health Plan of Northern Indiana,
has received payments from only about 20% of applicants, nearly all using the firm’s online portal, said Jim Brunnemer, the chief financial officer. It is sending invoices and email reminders to those who haven’t yet sealed the deal. If payment isn’t made by New Year’s Eve, PHP has been
told by federal officials that it must void the application.
Another complication is that insurers also don’t have a lot of time to process applications and send out ID cards. The timeline, particularly over the holiday week, will prove “challenging” for some companies, one industry executive said.
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/12/0...h-of-premiums/
How many people have paid their first month of Obamacare premium?
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Originally Posted by revelarts
