Please keep in mind that healthcare.org healthcare.gov (oops) may work fine(ish) but we have no idea how often enrollment information gets mangled by so-called ‘834 errors’ on the way to your insurance company. Someone knows of course, but whoever that is will not answer any questions from the press.
Have you enrolled in coverage yet? For those of you who had trouble, did you try again this week? It could be helpful to contact your insurance company and verify that the enrollment information made it through intact. In the best of worlds you will hear exactly what you expect. If there are any surprises, though, it will be important to know how often that happens and from which sources (e.g., state or national exchange sites).
MomSense
healthcare.org ??
Tommy
I enrolled. Long story, but started to try to get on the first day. Tried many times. Took more than a week to get through the entire enrollment process and view the plans. At this point I was the most pissed, cause I had no easy way to compare plans. I just had to download the PDF for each and review them myself.
At this point I called the hotline number. That lady totally took care of me. Took longer then I would have liked, but as a self-employed person I am saving $67/month and I have a plan that is far better then what I have now.
So I can’t really complain.
srv
It isn’t broken if we can’t measure it.
jharp
I have not yet.
My wife is quitting her job and her insurance and we don’t know about the timing.
Do we have to wait until she quits?
Tommy
@jharp: Nope, you can sign-up right now, well if the site works. I suggest going through and getting your account set-up and verified you are who you are, via best I can tell your credit reports (questions based off of them), and then you can view plans. At this point I called their hotline. I’d strongly suggest this.
Southern Beale
Not website related BUT:
A friend of mine enrolled over the phone three weeks ago, hadn’t heard a peep and called back only to be told they’d lost all of her information. Said it had taken 45 minutes, had to dig out her tax records and everything and now they have no record of her application at all.
Tommy
@Southern Beale: See that sucks. I went through about 99% of the process online and then called. I did this on purpose, cause well I wanted my information in my account. I am not saying I figured they might lose my information, I am just a tech nerd and do pretty complex e-Commerce sites for a living, and I know if I can get an account set-up and all my information entered, then when I call it makes it 110% easier for the person taking my call.
mk3872
The Admin is not giving out error rate % #s because they will simply just retransmit all of the 834s again once the data is corrected.
Because it is all stored in the Healthcare DB, they can resend the forms any time. And insurance companies don’t need to start honoring the policies until January anyhow.
MikeJ
@mk3872:
If all that’s true we can’t whine about how the n—– fucked everything up!
Gypsy Howell
I enrolled 3 weeks ago, still haven’t heard from my new insurer. Called them yesterday, and they had no record of me yet. So, called the ACA #, she assured me my enrollment had gone through, and she gave me a about 5 different ID #s for my plan and enrollment. I called back my insurer again today, but they are unable to look up new enrollees from the healthcare.gov website. He suggested I “wait til next week, and then call back.” (Because….??)
So, while the front end problems on the website may have been fixed for the most part, it’s clear there are still issues with actually getting the information to the insurers.
Sure hope I have insurance come Jan 1, as my old plan will be cancelled.
I suppose worst-case scenario, I will apply directly with the insurer before Dec 15, and cancel my healthcare.gov application, if such a thing can be done. I’m not eligible for subsidies, so this could work for me, but someone with subsidies might be out of luck.
I’m just trying to be optimistic that they’ll get everything fixed on time. Gulp.
BobbyThomson
Did you even read the linked article?
? Martin
@mk3872:
And it’s difficult to tell where the fault lies. I have a close relative right this minute in Michigan contracting (for quite a bit of money) with an insurer to get their data systems to properly accept the 834 records. Insurers pre-exchange could run as shitty a data back-end as they could tolerate as it rarely interacted with other systems for the purpose of enrollment. The exchanges forced a lot of insurers to clean that mess up, and some put the problem off until the last minute.
So there are problems on both side of the equation here, but naturally the free market would never be blamed for this. After all, they never get data systems wrong (That’s Google fucking up a website, for those unaware).
Mike E
@jharp: FPer Richard Mayhew sez goferit, don’t postpone joy. I’m gonna wait ’til Friday, an arbitrary date, to finally sign up….stay tuned!
Lokahi
Registered in mid-November, enrolled in late November, received an immediate email from the insurer (Humana) saying the enrollment is being processed.
Out of paranoia/caution, called Humana this afternoon and was told enrollment is underway, my first month’s premium payment has been received, a member ID number should be coming in two weeks, and all looks good to go.
Having heard not-so-good stories about Humana customer service, I won’t rest comfortably until I get the ID number and paperwork–but for now, I’ve got no reason to doubt that everything in my experience with the Exchange has gone exceedingly smoothly.
ThatPirateGuy
Last week my wife pulled the trigger using the healthcare.gov and we got a packet detailing the correct plan in a few days.
Craig
Based on the Post article, I would think the high end in transmission errors is around 33%, and the low end…probably isn’t a whole lot lower.
But there are errors and there are errors. If, as HHS claims, the big problem was that SSNs weren’t getting filled in, that’s a big plate of nothing. The insurer just has to call the enrollee (My God! You mean they have to do more than cash the checks?) and fill it in themselves, if HHS can’t get it done. But if the transmissions are complete garbage–and if the transmissions are garbage because the database records are garbage–then we have a very big problem.
So it’s somewhere between a big yawn and the end of the world, and no good way, really, to know which. Fun!
MomSense
On Sunday night I helped some friend enroll on healthcare.gov. It was very smooth. In the end, we had to call because they needed to verify their immigration status (one has a green card, the other a naturalized citizen). The person who spoke with us was fabulous. She was upbeat, well spoken, helpful, and sounded like she was smiling on the other end of the line. They ended up getting a Silver plan with cost sharing for $54 and change per month and their son is now enrolled in CHIP. My friends also signed up for dental insurance. The premiums come in at just under $100 per month which is half the cost of just the two root canals that the Dad needs to get next month. Their son’s dental care is covered by CHIP (MaineCare AKA Medicaid).
Mom has diabetes which she has not been treating. Dad is very healthy but hasn’t had colon cancer or prostate screenings. After the conversation, Mom had tears and Dad said “Go ObamaCare”. For this family, it was a BFD!! Mom got a call yesterday from Maine Health which is a new cooperative that is their new insurer.
The whole experience for them was great.
Julia Grey
SOUTH CAROLINA:
My son appparently can’t get his identity verified. We sent electronic documents. Nothing for weeks. I called the help line, they suggested we send hard copies. Nothing for weeks.
Finally today I gave up and started a new application. Stopped again by the necessity to prove his identity. WHY IS THAT???
Uploaded electronic documents. Now we wait again.
Perry Como
I can get further than I could before, but the site is now throwing an error 500 on an AJAX call while trying to browse plans. Le sigh.
Mnemosyne
@Julia Grey:
I know it’s a weird question, but is your son a naturalized citizen or natural born (i.e. he has a birth certificate from a US state). Many of the intractable blocks people seem to run into pop up if they’re naturalized rather than natural born.
If he’s natural born, I don’t know what the problem could be. He may want to check his credit report and make sure there hasn’t been any identity theft.
aimai
@Mnemosyne: Yeah. This seems like you ought to be able to get an actual answer.
lonesomerobot
Well, I want to believe, but the site still sucks. Two days ago I was able to log in but couldn’t get past the electronic signature page. Today I couldn’t even log in; tried multiple browsers, clearing cache/history/cookies/etc. – attempts to log in just reloaded the page as if I hadn’t even tried.
I finally just broke down and called the 800 number. And this I recommend wholeheartedly. A very nice person there helped me finally complete the registration, verifying my identity and all (although there were even times when she would say, “let’s see if this works…”). So at least we’re on the way to having coverage, but man, what a fustercluck that website is. I’m a web developer and can only say they have royally screwed the pooch up, down, and sideways. It’s a total shame, because if it had even been half the disaster it is, at least there wouldn’t be justification for the right-wing crowing about it. But I’m afraid to say they’re getting the ammunition they want because it is full of FAIL.
I must reiterate: if you’re having problems, do yourself a favor and just call. It was fairly quick, I didn’t have to hold for more than a minute, and now my registration is done and we’re on to the choosing our plan stage.
Gypsy Howell
For those having problems with the website, I’ll reiterate what others have recommended in the past. Go to healthsherpa.com to see what your options are for plans and subsidies.
Once you’ve made up your mind about what plan you want, then try calling the 800 number to enroll. Or, if you aren’t eligible for subsidies, you can enroll directly through the insurer.
Yatsuno
Hey it’s better than the 456. Drug addict aliens who get high on the hormones of human children? Yeah, that wasn’t creepy at all.
Triumph
I’ve been meaning to post in one of these threads… I enrolled through healthcare.gov about a week and a half ago, and it apparently worked just fine because I received a letter from BlueCross BlueShield of NC asking for my first payment to make sure my coverage goes into effect January 1st.
Karen in SoCal
I enrolled through Covered California last month in an Anthem Blue Cross PPO. I haven’t gotten a bill or any acknowledgement from the insurance company, even though the website told me my enrollment was successful. Should I be worried that something went wrong? How long does it usually take?
smintheus
We’ve been trying for 2 months to sign up via the federal website, and are no closer…perhaps farther away than ever…to being allowed to evaluate the plans available to us. Once a glitch caused it to reject personal verification information, way back when, it hasn’t permitted us to backtrack and try to redo what the glitch rejected. So we were forced to have Experian verify our info and send it in to healthcare.gov. Another glitch caused the site to reject the info sent to it by Experian.
So we spent hours on the phone getting somebody at their end to enter the info into their system. The website had screwed up a lot of the info that it had accepted, so that was a major operation trying to unscrew what all the glitches had done to our account.
Finally we were advised that before we could access the exchange we had to send them photocopies of IDs to verify our identity. Supposedly it would take 1 to 2 weeks for them to review our IDs and clear us. 2 weeks later, still nothing has been done.
Today we tried to access our account, but as soon as we entered the password we were sent right back to the log in page…with no error message or statement that the password was incorrect. It looks like our account may have simply been wiped out entirely.
Totally fed up with this idiocy. Tomorrow I’m going to call in and insist that they fix the situation immediately, and let us get on with it.
AnotherBruce
Has anybody considered calling up the insurance companies and asking them what they have to offer? This is really not meant to be snarky, I’m curious if anyone has, it’s what I plan to do, and I live in Washington where the website works fine. Why not call and try to negotiate?
Tim F.
@Karen in SoCal: Phone Anthem to find out. You definitely need to follow up with the insurance company and make sure.
@smintheus: Have you considered creating a new account? A lot of people with accounts that seemed hopelessly cursed just created a new account from a new email address and it seemed to go perfectly the second time. I hate to say it but that account you are using now may be a goner.
muricafukyea
Can someone please explain why everyone on the left are always whining about healthcare. You wankers whined up a storm when you never got single payer. Many of you said you were not going to vote. Boy howdy that sure worked out well for you in 2010 eh?
Now you wankers are whining about a fucking website. A website that works pretty damn good btw considering it’s probably one of the most if not the most complicated multi-database websites in the world.
Most of the hubub is really just political noise from the right. At least I understand the right and their whining because their motivations are pretty easy to understand. On the left I just don’t get it. Will you wankers ever be satisfied or will you continue to let the perfect be the enemy of the good?
Another Holocene Human
@AnotherBruce: Whatever floats your boat, man. I just go to their website and see what’s on offer and I would not touch anything that’s not an exchange plan. Of course, I live in a state with no consumer protection to speak of an a Republican AG. YMMV.
Another Holocene Human
@muricafukyea: I, for one, reserve the right to kvetch about American can’t-do-it-iveness, especially on government procurements, which I suspect suck so hard because they ARE procurements. When gov’t run stuff in house it was a lot leaner. The argument seems to be that contractors can be laid off, but looking at the military projects that won’t die that’s bullshit… oh yeah, employees can be dropped like that, but contracts? Hell to the naw. Rentiers are forever. Even rightie Heinlein understood that shit. Gov’ts run IT all year round. It makes no sense to buy off the shelf or hire contractors unless it makes sense to do those things. (Off the shelf was the notion when they rammed MS through on the military, though at the time they did it, it cost a bundle and SUCKED. But, hey, it made Bill Gates rich.)
It’s an attack on labor, it’s an attack on the middle class, it’s an attack on government effectiveness which is an attack on all the little guy taxpayers who need that tax dollar to stretch to provide them services effectively, whose tax dollar purchases more in the bulk bin than they could individually provide for themselves.
Where I get off is all the people blaming Obama for anything and everything that happens during his admin. When Bush’s lieutenants messed up we mostly blamed them and only proximately blamed Bush for bringing the fools in, but if anyone fucks up under Obama’s watch it’s Obama’s fault. Sounds like psychosis to me. All the Republican sabotage in the world and all the shitty leadership by exec agency heads doesn’t matter, it’s all Obama. I just saw something on dKos about how part of what is going on with Obama’s very tiny rate of pardons is the chief pardon guy is some hack promoted over his head by Bush for ideological reasons who is fucking up at his job big time and sending bad information to the White House and, best of all, it’s not an appointed position so he’s very hard to remove. But to hear the emoprogs wail, it’s Obama, Obama, Obama. Is he Jesus? Is he Satan? Does he send you nightmares and feed off your dreams? Have 70% of white people gone psychotic since January, 2009 or were they like that already?
Triumph
Oh, I should note- I made an account before the site went live, got locked out of it and had to make a 2nd account. Then, I tried twice to sign up with no success before last week, when it worked just fine.
smintheus
I spent 90 mins on the phone tonight, and still didn’t resolve much. The person I spoke to, and her supervisor, and apparently a specialist they consulted, could not understand why our account has so many bizarre glitches. We’ve been confirmed finally, but we still can’t log into our account to check out the plans available. Nobody could explain this or say when or how that situation could be remedied.
Also, while were talking this woman said that our account information kept changing from one minute to the next. Weeks ago we were given a figure for how big a tax rebate we’d get next year. This evening, it had dropped to four-fifths of the figure originally cited. Then a short time later it had dropped to only one-third of what we were originally cited. Then a while later it changed back again to four-fifths. The woman looked into this at length and said that nobody there had ever seen anything like this happen, or had the foggiest idea what was going on.
I asked whether we could just abandon this demonic account and start again from scratch. Initially the woman I was talking to said it might be a possibility and said she’d look into it. But later she could not say anything definitive.
Our ‘case’ has been forwarded to some kind of urgent last-resort fix-it center, that supposedly will call us in a few days to help sort some of this out. We shall see if anything is ever done.
Irony Abounds
I’ve bellyached before on here about the problems I’ve had with the website and caught shit for doing so, so I’ll keep this short. My online application was on hold until I sent in proof of identity to some sinkhole in Kentucky. Never heard another thing about that. About three weeks ago I gave up on the website and used the phone in application process. I provided all of my information and completed the application over the phone. They then are supposed to mail you your completed application which will allow you to complete the process and call back in so they could READ YOU YOUR OPTIONS OVER THE PHONE (can’t think of a stupider way of doing things). I was told I would receive the paperwork in two weeks. Three weeks later I haven’t seen a damn thing. In the meantime I determined by going to healthsherpa.com that a plan comparable to the one I currently have will cost me around $120 more per month. Also, however, I have just received word that as a result of the ObamaFix, Blue Cross will allow me to renew my existing plan at the current rate through December 31, 2014. So the hell with the Exchange. I’m sure lots of people are now getting coverage with the new and improved website, but it was a huge waste of time and effort for me and I only hope things improve by the end of next year.