Shop for Christmas presents? Or for health insurance?
With Monday’s 11:59 p.m. deadline looming for people who want to buy health insurance that kicks in Jan. 1, crunch time is here.
The White House doesn’t plan to announce how many people were enrolled in time to secure coverage on New Year’s Day. Whatever the number is, however, it will likely be only a small percentage of the 901,000 New Jerseyans currently without insurance.
The issues that hobbled the federal website for subsidized insurance have diminished — but haven’t disappeared, according to frustrated consumers.
To make matters worse, errors that doomed applications back in October have stuck to some of them like gum on a shoe, thwarting subsequent attempts to enroll.
“A lot of people who were eager and signed up early, they just got into some kind of digital netherworld, never to get out,” said Nancy Metcalf, a senior editor for Consumer Reports, who has been answering reader questions about the Affordable Care Act for months.
“We basically lost two months, from October 1 to December 1,” conceded Dennis Gonzalez, a regional official with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Some people have had their applications sail through the process without a hitch.
Others describe being tormented by a balky website, nice but helpless customer service operators, and a technological runaround that feels like it was orchestrated by vengeful cyborgs.
Michelle Davis, 30, of North Plainfield, spent days stuck in some kind of Obamacare limbo: After several false starts, she ended up with a faulty application buried somewhere in the system. It couldn’t be located to be corrected, yet its presence prevented her from starting over.
She’s unemployed, with underlying health issues and insurance that lapses Jan 28. So she’s anxious to have coverage in place as soon as possible.
“The system just kicked me out again this morning,” she said late last week. “I’m about to punch somebody.”
Americans who don’t have health insurance have until the end of March to buy a policy or face a fine. The Dec. 23 deadline is only for those who want policies that begin in January. If they miss that deadline, they can still sign up for coverage that begins in February.
At one of the two New Jersey enrollment centers that are now open seven days a week, people have been showing up with sheaths of papers in their arms, hoping to get one-on-one advice.
There, employees of SRA, a federal IT contractor, have a few tools at their disposal that individuals do not. They have a separate hotline to call and offer this bit of practical advice: If you can’t reapply because your e-mail address is associated with an earlier attempt, set up a new e-mail account at yahoo.com, google.com, or hotmail.com.
“I’ve been on the phone for hours. They’re very helpful and very nice, but they get the same error message I do,” said Karen Young of Hillsdale, who came to the Wayne center in hopes of getting help with her application.
Start from scratch (again)
A woman from Paterson accompanied her Spanish-speaking mother to the office, hopeful that the certified counselors there had some magic tricks up their sleeve to get her application accepted.
“My sister and I have both been trying. She’d try one day, then I’d try the next,” said Judy, who didn’t want to give her last name. “Then we kind of just gave up for a while.” She had been paying for her mother’s insurance since her mother lost her job, but said that was getting too expensive.
The average enrollment session at the center is taking 90 minutes, said staffers. A chunk of that time is often devoted to undoing the computer glitches that snagged earlier attempts at enrolling.
“Many of the individuals are people who never had insurance before. They don’t understand what a co-pay is, or what a deductible is,” said Gonzalez, visiting the enrollment center that was hastily set up in a medical office building in Wayne.
“They’re afraid, or hesitant, to go through the process. And they’re afraid to go to the website — so that’s another challenge.”
“I still get a lot of questions from people who don’t really know what they’re supposed to do — especially people who have been poor for a very long time,” said Metcalf. “Because they’ve never had insurance, they’ve almost internalized that they can’t have it.”
By the numbers
A look at enrollment figures nationwide shows only 8.4 percent of New Jersey’s uninsured had enrolled by the December update issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
The figures, compiled by Transamerica Center for Health Studies, show a wide variation by state. Vermont has processed applications for 45 percent of its uninsured, while Mississippi has enrolled just 2.8 percent.
By way of pushback, the White House last week categorized, state by state, the benefits that Americans have already seen from the sweeping changes in health law.
In New Jersey, 3.8 million residents with pre-existing conditions will no longer be charged higher prices because of their health status. About 1.5 million will gain expanded coverage for mental health or substance abuse treatment.
And in the first 10 months of 2013, 157,000 seniors have saved an average of $1,052 because of extended coverage of Medicare’s “doughnut hole” for prescription costs.
But as the deadline loomed, the administration announced a third retreat from a pending deadline: People with canceled policies can get a “hardship exemption,” meaning they will be allowed to purchase catastrophic insurance through Obamacare exchanges.
0 comments:
Post a Comment