Connecticut’s new health insurance marketplace is trying to find a way to work around using a federal hub to help verify eligible applicants for Medicaid and private insurance subsidies, The Associated Press reports.
But as of Wednesday, Kevin Counihan, CEO of Access Health CT, said Connecticut’s online insurance marketplace remains dependent on the data center, which experienced outages in recent days.
 When creating the exchange, Counihan said Connecticut tried to reduce the number of times it would need to rely on the federal hub to verify an applicant’s information. Instead of the required 14 service calls to the hub, Connecticut reduced it to seven.
Counihan noted that during the recent federal hub outages, Connecticut consumers were still able to use the state website to create accounts and shop anonymously for pricing comparisons. He said Access Health CT is the only state exchange website that has not gone down since open enrollment began on Oct. 1.
Meanwhile, during a Wednesday conference call with reporters, Counihan said Access Health CT has been able to fight off five hacking attempts so far. Two were from a foreign country and were referred to the National Security Agency.
