Kevin Knauss: Health, History, Travel, Insurance
Posts on the development and implementation of the California health insurance market place, application, account, enrollment, termination.
The California Endowment teamed up with the Service Employees International Union- United Healthcare Worker West to host a “We Connect” event at the Sacramento Convention Center to enroll local residents in new Covered California Affordable Care Act health plans. While the production of the event was fairly glossy and festive, like many aspects of enrolling in the new ACA plans through Covered California there were many frustrations and challenges for attendees and volunteers
From problems with logging in, bad and missing information to the virtually inoperable agent dashboard, the Covered California web portal to enroll in new ACA health plans has serious issues that no one at the California Health Benefits Exchange wants to address openly.
Blue Shield of California has agreed to allow upwards of 115,000 individual and family plan members to keep their existing policies through March 31, 2014. The press release from the office of Insurance Commissioner Jones indicated the agreement to allow the policy holders to keep their plans past the original December 31, 2013 cancellation date was the result of a late filing or notification requirement for plan closures on the part of Blue Shield.
From the sloppy training, poorly designed and broken website, lack of real information about plans to the patronizing pep talk tone of the webinars, I’m just about done with Covered California. If I didn’t feel so strongly about health care reform and the importance of the Affordable Care Act I would have cut my ties with Covered California long ago and just concentrated on keeping my current clients with their current carriers.
I had just finished the family’s application into a new Covered California health plan when I realized that we hadn’t chosen a pediatric dental plan for their son. I had that sinking feeling when I screw up an application…or did I? According to a customer service agent, Covered California hasn’t released the children’s dental plans.
We can be fairly certain that the big push to enroll college students into new ACA health plans will result in a large portion of the students channeled into Medi-Cal plans. It is estimated that are 480,000 young adults age 19-29 that will be eligible for Medi-Cal2. If we assume a full-time student is able to work 20 hours per week, that monthly wage still puts them below the 138% of the federal poverty line ($15,865) and automatic Medi-Cal.
Covered California announced that it has yanked Alameda Alliance for Health (AAH)from its health plans in the state exchange. The trigger for removal was that AAH had not been granted a material modification to its licensed from the Department of Managed Health Care to engage in commercial insurance sales for 2014. This lack of ability to sell health plans to individuals and businesses through Covered California technically puts AAH out of compliance with the contract they signed with the insurance exchange to offer health plans to the public.
The insurance companies know more about the variety of reasons for plan closures than they are telling the public. The CEO’s of major health plans should be brought before congress an asked about the real reasons they are closing plans.
The eligibility requirements to receive premium assistance for the new ACA health plans offered through either the federal or state websites is based on a household’s estimated income in 2014. Past federal tax returns are a great starting point and guide, but an individual or family’s wages may have significantly changed in 2013 and may change again in 2014.
As if Covered California doesn’t have enough to do with fixing website problems, enrolling Certified Enrollment Counselors and certifying insurance agents to sell their health plans, they now have to launch a $5 million grant program to create regional Navigators. It is unfortunate that the rules associated with the Affordable Care Act mandate that states that set up their own exchanges must also create a Navigator program that looks virtually identical to the fledgling Certified Enrollment Entities and Counselors In-Person Assistance Program.
