At least 30,000 Hawaii residents with Obamacare health insurance are at risk of losing coverage at year’s end due to significant wait times in signing up on the federal exchange.
Hawaii residents are taking over an hour on average — and as long as four hours for non-English speakers — to apply for health coverage via the federal marketplace, healthcare.gov.
On Sunday, Obamacare coverage in Hawaii switched to the federal marketplace from the Hawaii Health Connector, the state-based exchange, which is ending operations completely in 2016. The Connector is contracted by the state to assist people signing up for insurance under the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, but didn’t have enrollment numbers as of Friday. A spokesman for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), which oversees the federal exchange, said the government agency is not releasing enrollment figures at this time.
“Hawaii is at risk of being unable to process all re-enrollments. We are having significant challenges getting people enrolled on healthcare.gov,” Jeff Kissel, the Connector’s executive director, told board members at a meeting Friday. “Even if we put all the people we have on it, we’re not going to get done by Jan. 31. We told CMS we’ve got to have a contingency plan.”
All of the roughly 40,000 Hawaii residents who received health insurance through the Connector must re-enroll on healthcare.gov because policies will not automatically roll over to the federal exchange. If a policyholder does not re-enroll, coverage will end Dec. 31. The 2016 enrollment period closes Jan. 31.
One of the major problems is that automated identity verification is not working on healthcare.gov, Kissel said.
Average enrollment time for individuals takes about one hour and 15 minutes, while the time for those signing up over the phone through the federal call center is in excess of two hours, he said.
When language assistance is required, the Connector’s so-called marketplace assisters, or outreach workers, must first wait in the federal queue for the call to be answered, then wait again for the federal call center to find the right language specialist.
“Actual enrollment time experienced under these circumstances have been up to four hours,” Kissel said. “Although the federal call center operates 24 hours per day, they do not staff the special marketplace assister line during Hawaii’s operating hours.”
This has required the Connector’s outreach workers to call the regular public number for healthcare.gov, where there is no marketplace assister support, thereby extending application processing times.
“We’ve had to wait as long as 55 minutes on the public support line,” he said. “It’s 2013 all over again. The problems are different, but the crises are the same for our enrollees because we are required to re-enroll, unlike the 16 million people in this country who are already enrolled in healthcare.gov.”
Assuming the best-case scenario of 45 minutes per enrollment, with marketplace assisters working eight-hour days, seven days a week, “processing 30,000 individuals is likely to take over 140 labor-hour days.”
Healthcare.gov will be taken down at 2 p.m. today for maintenance during about 20 outreach events.
“All these people are going to show up, and we won’t be able to do anything. We won’t even be able to do paper applications because healthcare.gov doesn’t accept paper applications,” Kissel said. “This means that Hawaii is at risk of being unable to process the re-enrollments until sometime in March.”
