Kevin Knauss: Health, History, Travel, Insurance
Posts related to health insurance agents in California working with Covered California, small groups, and the different health plans. Also known as brokers.
Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones continues to wage not only a regulatory turf battle with Covered California over the issue of policy cancellations, he is also waging a war of words. No sooner had the California Health Benefits Board voted to continue with the planned cancellation of health plans for December 31st, Commissioner Jones fired off a press release to announce how unhappy he was at the Board of Covered California.
Thousands of health insurance agents across California have done what Covered California has asked us to do to become certified to sell their new health plans. Unfortunately, Covered California has not held up their end of the agreement by creating an agent system within the CalHEERS website that allows us to monitor the progress of an application or to know if we will ever get paid. I am now leaning toward taking my client business right to the carriers and boycotting Covered California altogether.
So I bit the bullet and attended a local community presentation by a volunteer from a Certified Educator for CoveredCA adding to the information I had recently researched online. After the talk, I conferred with the presenter who was a volunteer through Sacramento Mighty Oaks and stated my concerns about my situation. She was wonderful, gladly offering to be in touch with me with answers in the days that followed.
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.
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.
Agents that are certified to sell Covered California health insurance sign an agreement which in part states that the agent will fairly represent all the different plans. I have faith that all the agents will accurately represent all the plans, but they are under various incentives and realities that may distort some agent’s presentations to clients.
Designating an agent to help you enroll in a new individual and family plan or a small group plan offered through Covered California is pretty simple. Not only can the agent help with the application when he or she is your designated agent, a health insurance agent also provides another level of customer service for future changes.
