D'Ohbama!: If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan...

"I've lost hope."

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Bob Shlora of Alpharetta, Ga., was supposed to be a belated Obamacare success story. After weeks of trying, the 61-year-old told ABC News he fully enrolled in a new health insurance plan through the federal marketplace over the weekend, and received a Humana policy ID number to prove it.

But two days later, his insurer has no record of the transaction, Shlora said, even though his account on the government website indicates that he has a plan.

"I feel like this: My application was taken … by a bureaucrat, it was put on a conveyor belt and it's still going around, and it's never going to leave the building," he said. "I've lost hope. If it happens, great."

Obama administration officials acknowledged today that some of the roughly 126,000 Americans who completed the torturous online enrollment process in October and November might not be officially signed up with their selected issuer, even if the website has told them they are.

Technical problems surrounding the transfer of an applicant's personal information from the federal marketplace to the selected insurance company have plagued the system since its launch, making it difficult for insurers to finalize some enrollments. The 834 forms that issuers receive from the system have been riddled with errors, including often duplicate or incomplete information.

While the front-end of the website has been vastly improved, the back-end glitches remain a serious concern, IT experts and industry officials say.

"Until the enrollment process is working from end-to-end, many consumers will not be able to enroll in coverage," said Karen Ignani, president and CEO of America's Health Insurance Plans. "In addition to fixing the technical problems with healthcare.gov, the significant 'backend' issues must also be resolved to ensure that coverage can begin on Jan. 1, 2014."

Meanwhile for consumers, it's all turning out to be a giant headache. Shlora, who currently pays $2,800 a month for health care, told ABC News the "false braggadocio" coming from the White House is making it worse.

"The White House announced that they have met their goal," he said of the much-touted improvements to the website. "They are taking applications but they aren't going anywhere. What kind of goal is that?"

For those who thought they enrolled in a plan through the federal exchange since October, the Obama administration now advises that individuals contact their insurance company to verify coverage and if none exists, to start all over again.

"Consumers should absolutely call their selected plan, confirm that they have paid their first month's premium and that coverage would be available to them, beginning January 1 st," said Julie Bataille, communications director for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS.

"We will also make a concerted effort to reach consumers who selected a plan over the course of these past several weeks, so that they know what their next steps would be, which include paying their first premium and confirming enrollment with their plan," she said.

Federal health insurance helpers told Shlora to wait several days for a specialist from the website to get back to him, he said, while Humana has told him that his application may pop up by the end of the week.

In recent weeks, Bataille has repeatedly refused to discuss the scope of the back-end problem, declining requests for information about the error rate among the 834 forms and how many people might be affected.

CMS officials said today that a single "bug" in the system that prevented a Social Security number from being included in an application was the root cause of "more than 80 percent of the 834 production errors." Officials said that problem has been fixed, though they would not say when it was first identified and how many applications were flawed.

http://abcnews.go.com/m/blogEntry?id=21076641&ref=http://t.co/0GZLvwaK3v

 

the surge centered on about a half-dozen people who had taken leave from various technology companies to join the effort. They included Michael Dickerson, a site reliability engineer at Google who had also worked on Mr. Obama’s campaign and now draws praise from contractors as someone who is “actually making a difference,” one said.

Even so, one person working on the project said, “Surge was probably an overstatement.”​

tea party source link.

 

if you like your identity, you can keep your identity.

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Flaws in Enrollment Records for Insurance Exchange
By ROBERT PEAR
Published: December 6, 2013

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration said Friday that there could be problems with the enrollment records for a quarter of all the people who signed up for health insurance through the federal marketplace in October and November, raising questions about whether consumers will get coverage in time to pay for their medical care next month.
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Health Law Eases Some Worries but Creates Others (December 7, 2013)
Even now, the administration said, it may be sending incomplete or erroneous information to insurers on one out of every 10 people who try to enroll.

Julie Bataille, a spokeswoman at the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said the agency was working with insurers to correct the errors and resolve discrepancies in records kept by the government and by insurers.

In some cases, the government did not notify insurers of people who enrolled online at HealthCare.gov. The government refers to these people as “C.M.S. orphans” because the consumers successfully completed the application process and selected health plans, but the government did not send the information to the insurers.

An administration official said the government would do everything possible to “rescue the orphans.”

In other cases, Ms. Bataille said, the government sent more than one enrollment notice for the same person to an insurer. And in some instances, she said, the information sent was incorrect. A child may have been listed as a parent, a name may have been misspelled, or an address may be wrong.

Moreover, officials said, some people who signed up for a health plan are listed in insurance company records but not in the government’s records. In those cases, consumers may have canceled enrollment in a health plan, but the government failed to inform the insurer.

The errors and omissions resulted from technical problems that crippled the website in its first weeks, Ms. Bataille said.

With hundreds of hardware upgrades and software changes, Ms. Bataille said, the site now works well for the vast majority of consumers who use it. However, insurers say they are still seeing problems in “back-end systems,” which are supposed to deliver consumer information to insurers.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/07/u...nrollment-records-for-insurance-exchange.html