More than a week after the start of open enrollment, the Hawaii Health Connector is still struggling to get people re-enrolled in Obamacare coverage before their health insurance policies expire on Dec. 31.
The Connector said Wednesday it lost the opportunity to enroll hundreds of people over the weekend because the federal exchange, healthcare.gov, was not working.
The federal system was down for maintenance from 2 p.m. Saturday during about 20 outreach events and then unexpectedly crashed on Sunday during another 10 events, said Eric Alborg, the Connector’s deputy executive director.
“Some of our more significant community outreach events on Sunday are with our faith-based groups. Nobody was able to get through the process,” he said. “It means that we will need to schedule another appointment or follow up separately, which impacts the overall number of people we can potentially support through the enrollment process.”
All of the roughly 40,000 Hawaii residents who received health insurance through the Connector must re-enroll on healthcare.gov to avoid losing coverage on Jan. 1. Policies will not automatically roll over to the federal exchange. The 2016 enrollment period closes Jan. 31.
At least 30,000 Hawaii residents are at risk of losing coverage due to significant wait times in signing up on the federal exchange, Connector officials warned last week.
It is now taking more than two hours on average to enroll Hawaii residents on the federal exchange, up from more than an hour last week and 35 minutes last year, Connector officials said. The application process is taking as long as four hours for non-English speakers, which is a problem particularly for the 8,500 Micronesians who switched from the state’s Medicaid health insurance program for low-income residents to Obamacare this year.
“For many families our kokua (outreach workers) have to meet two to three times or more to complete an application, which means the application time could actually be quite a bit longer,” Alborg said.
On Nov. 1, Obamacare coverage in Hawaii switched to the federal marketplace from the Connector, the state-based exchangethat is ending its 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.
The Connector said it is working with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which oversees the federal exchange, to figure out if there are any contingency plans to get people enrolled quicker. The federal government hasn’t provided Connector officials with enrollment numbers, but plans to publicly announce them in December.
“That’s fairly basic information if you’re transitioning a population to get them all re-enrolled and know how you’re doing along the way,” Alborg said. “We especially need to know because if for some reason we are noticing people aren’t getting enrolled and our numbers aren’t tracking to where we need to be (we have to fix that).
“Unfortunately, we’re the first state that is in a time zone this far away from the East Coast,” he continued. “It’s a new challenge for them to make sure healthcare.gov can service a state so far away from where its contact center operates or where their operations are based.If people don’t get their health insurance that means they won’t be going to their doctors and hospitals. If there’s a break in continuity and something happens, that could be a serious problem.”
