The state’s health insurance exchange, Access Health CT, says 7 percent of its private insurance customers risk losing their Obamacare coverage and related tax credits in the next three months because they have ignored notices to submit required documentation.
Spurred by the growing backlog, Access Health CEO Jim Wadleigh held a conference call with reporters Tuesday, during which he urged the 7,000 customers to submit federally required documentation of their income, citizenship status and other details. He said customers have been calling the exchange after trying to use their health insurance and finding out it had been canceled.
“We began seeing a spike in these occurrences in the June and July time frame,” Wadleigh said.
He said the exchange has hired 10 more staff members to handle phone calls regarding loss of coverage, is renegotiating its call center contract, and plans to robo-call customers who are facing imminent deadlines. Those calls would be in addition to the four mailed notices the exchange sends customers about needed documents.
The exchange had more than 110,000 non-Medicaid enrollees at the end of March, and this week was down to approximately 97,000, Wadleigh said. He said he has canvassed brokers, who estimated that two-thirds of that drop was caused by customers not paying their premiums.
Beyond the problem of customers not following mailed instructions, Wadleigh said the exchange has run into another challenge. Xerox, which verifies the documents, has a backlog of approximately 16,000 customers, according to Wadleigh.
Xerox is contracted to the Department of Social Services to verify Medicaid enrollments under Obamacare. The company doesn’t have a contract directly with Access Health.
The exchange is looking into getting its own separate vendor and contractor to handle enrollments in private or so-called qualified health plans, Wadleigh said.
But DSS Spokesman David Dearborn said in an email Wednesday that the agency worries that splitting the work with another vendor could cause complications.
Dearborn, who said he wasn’t sure how Wadleigh calculated the 16,000-customer backlog number, said Xerox is caught up on verification through March. That prompted the recent surge in adverse-action notices to customers.
Though Wadleigh said the exchange’s computer system is working as designed, Dearborn contended that there have been system challenges since the exchange launched in 2013.
“The current situation is not a new or unfamiliar one,” Dearborn said.
For example, some delays were created by customers submitting multiple applications, which caused them to receive document requests even after they had submitted them, creating more work downstream for Xerox, he said.
He said a link to the federal government’s automated system for verifying lawful immigration status could help ease delays. But for now, those verifications are still being done manually.
