Nearly 2.5 million people enrolled in health insurance plans on the federal health care exchange by Friday to get Jan. 1 coverage, the Department of Health and Human Services said Tuesday.
New enrollment figures will be released Dec. 23 that include the period through Dec. 15. Those numbers could have been much higher if hundreds of thousands of people facing issues on the website or having questions could have gotten through to the call center.
Up to 500,000 people heard automated messages and left their names. They are awaiting return calls or receiving them Tuesday, said HHS principal deputy administrator Andy Slavitt on a press call Tuesday afternoon. That’s out of 1.6 million people who phoned the call center over the weekend and through Monday.
The website and call center “have done their jobs so far,” Slavitt said.
Want to publish your own articles on DistilINFO Publications?
Send us an email, we will get in touch with you.
Peak volume on the website Monday was 125,000 concurrent users, he said. The site didn’t run into “capacity constraints,” though he acknowledged a waiting room page was used for about 90 minutes while a database was updated.
As for the call center, Slavitt left open the possibility that more staff might be added to deal with last-minute rushes even though, as with holiday shopping procrastinators, people shouldn’t expect the best service at the last minute.
“This is not to sound a note of optimism,” Slavitt said. “Not everything can work perfectly for every consumer.”
HHS continues to urge people who signed up last year on the federal or state exchanges to shop around for a new plan, which would likely save them money, rather than to simply allow themselves to be re-enrolled in their current plan. HHS says these people have been contacted at least three times and, in many cases, more than a dozen times by phone, letter and/or email
Slavitt said consumers will be able to switch plans up until Feb. 15 if they don’t like their new plan once they get a bill.
The agency is contacting the fewer than 5% of people who enrolled on HealthCare.gov who can’t be automatically enrolled because their plans were discontinued and there was not a similar plan, or the plan changed service areas and the consumer is no longer in that area, or they live in Oregon — which just joined HealthCare.gov — and they need to select a plan to be re-enrolled.
Re-enrolling is all hundreds of thousands of people wanted to do late Monday night when they needed help on the federal website.
Many insurance agents and consumers reported facing longer than usual wait times Monday — often up to an hour — and were told they would get a returned call up to a week after the deadline. HHS says that if people gave the call center their contact information within the deadline, they would still be eligible for insurance that starts Jan. 1.
That made some of the members of Health Agents for America feel better as some were worried their clients’ insurance wouldn’t take effect Jan. 1 if their calls weren’t returned until after the Dec. 15 deadline
The call center is especially important because one of the biggest problems with the vastly improved site this year is that people must reset their passwords.Those who hadn’t accessed the site since last spring had their passwords changed automatically and many others have had trouble remembering answers to questions used to verify their identities.
Ten of the 14 states that have their own insurance exchanges extended their deadlines to give people more time to sign up. These include Minnesota, California and New York.
In a news release, Minnesota emphasized that residents will have until Dec. 20 to sign up for coverage and that it made the change because insurers extended their deadlines, “not because of technical issues.”
Date: December 17, 2014