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.
Agents passed the boot camp
As if our standard health insurance license and continuing education wasn’t good enough, Covered California had to set up a whole other certification process just for agents. This certification process consists of
- 8 hours of class training
- 4 hours of online learning
- Paying another fee to be appointed
- Passing a test
Extra poor training
Education is good, if the training appropriate. Covered California training has been lack luster in that it fails to speak to the nuts and bolts of individual and small business health insurance. (Covered California trainer mocks ACA) Because I have written about some of the fuzzy definitions on the Covered California application (What is household income?), I’ve gotten numerous calls from other agents with questions. They call me because to call Covered California is a minimum of a 30 to 45 minute wait time. (But they don’t report agent time on hold in their weekly enrollment stats)
Is Covered California fulfilling their mission?
The only two tangible improvements Covered California offers in the insurance market place is a place to receive tax credits to reduce monthly premiums and a side by side comparison of health plans. At this point, I have no idea if they are even meeting those key distinctions. Not only are agents confused, our clients are starting to become dubious as well. (One woman’s attempt to get health insurance through Covered California)
- Once the application is complete, no one even gets an email congratulating them on a successful enrollment or that the application is pending review. There is absolutely no communication between Covered California, the agents or the enrolling members.
- The pediatric dental plans are not even loaded into the system. All families must return to the website and select a dental plan for their children. (Where’s the dental plans?)
- Individual agent designation requests are not being received by the agents. I have no idea if I will become the broker of record after helping a client since the Covered California agent dash board is not forwarding the designation requests to me. (How to designate an agent)
- Agent dashboard is broken. The one aspect I was most excited about with Covered California was the ability to handle a variety of tasks for my clients such as adding a family member, adjusting income and premium assistance, and checking on the status of their application. None of those even work. The promise of an agent being able to start an application for a client is no where to be seen. (Covered California website: frustrations and failures)
- The website seems to be down even when it is up. Numerous times I have attempted to login with clients only to be faced with a black screen. The CalHEERS website offers no explanation as to why they won’t log us in. This had led to numerous wasted meetings because I can’t perform the necessary adjustments or selections on my side because the agent dash board doesn’t work.
- The Doctor Search feature is a joke. I have lost all confidence in the search function when it returns results like the doctor isn’t Board Certified or they are listed as speaking an improbable language like Arabic. When the search feature does work and the client adds the physician to their preferred providers, Covered California never displays which health plans the provider is associated with. There is a feature that lets you sort health plans by physician preferrence. But when using that feature, a Kaiser health plan was displayed for a doctor I clearly knew was with an independent physician’s group, I lost all confidence.
Confidence level near zero
I think that this is the bottom line: I’ve lost all confidence in Covered California. Admittedly, I naturally have a high level of anxiety when it comes to making sure a bureaucracy will actually fulfill their promise. I’ve been burnt too many times by health insurance companies and government departments saying one thing and then doing nothing. People have put their trust in me to facilitate the transaction of their health insurance in an efficient manner. Covered California has demonstrated that it is anything but efficient and I’m not sure how effective they are as well.
I will walk away
If I don’t see significant improvements with the website and their communication to agents and members by November 15th, I will begin to boycott the enrollment of my clients in Covered California and go straight to the respective carriers.
How much more rope should agents give Covered California?
I have given Covered California the “benefit of the doubt” more times than I can count and they have yet to live up to the promise. Frankly, I’m tired of the Covered California platitudes offered by men showing up for press events in coats and ties gushing over the ACA, making absurd amounts of money, when their organization can not deliver.
Premium assistance monopoly
Covered California may have the market cornered for premium assistance, but what good is that if they can’t really deliver the actual health plans.
- How many carriers have received an application from Covered California?
- How many counties have received the Medi-Cal request from Covered California?
- How many families that have enrolled through Covered California have received any notification that their insurance will go into effect on January 1, 2014?
I hope other insurance agents will seriously consider taking their business else where and boycott Covered California until they get their house in order.