While most of the 11.4 million Americans enrolling in Obamacare this year had a much smoother experience than last year, the same cannot be said for insurers, which are plagued with an obsolescent system that 18 months into the law is still under construction,
Politico reports.
"You’re not going to find a lot of customer-facing issues," an insurance industry official told the news website. "It’s more like you lift up the hood, and that’s where the problems are."
The federal exchange is available for Americans in 37 states. The District of Columbia and the remaining 13 states operate their own websites.
The system does not allow for automated subsidy payments, and it’s a complicated process just to add information like a marriage or the birth of a child.
When enrollees experience a life event, insurers have to send consumers back to HealthCare.gov, where they log the changes, which are then sent back to the insurers.
Despite many millions spent on technology to get the troubled system in working order after last year’s disastrous rollout, it’s costing insurers time and money to deal with "clunky workarounds and manual spreadsheets," according to Politico.
In order to get paid the subsidies from the federal government — a key component of how Obamacare works — insurance companies are required to fill out monthly manual spreadsheets telling the Department of Health and Human Services how much they are owed.
The Philadelphia Inquirer warned of the back-end issues in November, reporting that while open enrollment would provide consumers better technology and a shorter application form, the back end continued to be plagued with problems.
"There is still work that needs to be done on the back-end system," Clare Krusing, a spokeswoman for the trade group America's Health Insurance Plans, told the Inquirer. "It's an issue we have on the radar and working toward finding the right solution that works for consumers."
On Saturday, the public’s portion of HealthCare.gov experienced problems with the income verification portion of the sign-up process. It took officials six hours to fix.
A Health and Human Services spokeswoman blamed the problem on "intermittent issues with external verification sources" and said HHS worked with the IRS to fix the issue, according to
Reuters.
In April,
Accenture, the contractor hired to repair the troubled Obamacare website, announced it would cost $121 million to fix it. That price tag was $27 million more than the government paid the original contractor, CGI Federal, to build it.
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