Processing Obamacare

I recently signed up for NRO's email updates and so far I've gotten two articles, email access only, Morning Jolt, by Jim Geraghty. I include a lengthy excerpt, as you cannot find it at NRO:

"In Connecticut:

Nearly 400 individuals ages 55-64 who enrolled in the exchange between Oct. 1 and Oct. 15 qualified for Medicaid because their income was at or below 138 percent of the federal poverty level, and nearly 600 in that same age group have signed up for plans with one of the three private insurance carriers.

Of the 3,847 individuals who signed up for coverage, 1,857 qualified for Medicaid, 1,897 signed up for plans with one of the three private insurance carriers, and 93 qualified for the Children's Health Insurance Plan. Of the individuals who signed up with private carriers, 772 won't receive a subsidy and 1,125 will receive a federal subsidy to lower their monthly premium.

So 20 percent of the people who are buying insurance are paying their own way. So far, Obamacare is adding a lot of people to Medicaid and providing a lot of people with subsidies.

The Obamacare Navigators Are Lost

We are two weeks into the program, and I cannot emphasize this enough: NO ONE WITHIN THE ADMINISTRATION KNOWS WHAT IS GOING ON.

Five call center agents told CNN on Wednesday that because of an upgrade to the beleaguered website, many passwords were deleted if they were created in the first week or so after the launch. More recently created user names and passwords don't seem to have the same problems.

If the representatives have it right, some users will continue having trouble logging in, no matter how many times they try.

"They did maintenance on the website recently and deleted all the passwords, so they needed resetting," one agent wrote in a live online chat with a CNN reporter who has been attempting to go through the process of using the site.

"They deleted passwords on accident," said another agent who answered the phone at the healthcare.gov call center. "They lost them."

A senior administration official said these call agents are wrong. She said no passwords have been deleted, and the call agents were reading from a script that was given to them by mistake.

She adds that the administration has been trying to get them to stop using that script for the past week.

However, a call center agent said he'd received an e-mail as recently asMonday about the deleted passwords."

"It sounds like getting timely, accurate information to the navigators is going to be a big and lingering problem:

Navigators have been leading prospective applicants through paper and phone applications to get the process started. But it can take as many as 10 weeks from starting a paper application through actually enrolling in a plan, they said.

[Tim McKinney, president and CEO of the United Way of Tarrant County, Texas' largest navigator grantee with a nearly $5.9 million award] said as far as he knew, submitting an online application with a paper one pending should not cause any new problems.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services did not respond directly to questions on the 10 week time frame, saying only that processing times are likely to vary, based on the complexity of the household and the completeness of an application and supporting documents that are submitted.

And some of these navigators are about as effective as the folks who built the web site:

Two weeks into the roll out of Obamacare's online health insurance market, the two organizations chosen to help uninsured Nebraskans navigate the system haven't been able to sign up a single person for coverage.

Community Action of Nebraska was awarded about $562,000 and The Ponca Tribe of Nebraska nearly $38,000 to help people find health insurance on the federally run insurance exchange that began operating —and we use that term loosely — Oct. 1.  The online marketplace, Healthcare.gov, repeatedly freezes, says "come back later" or crashes when people attempt to create an account so they can shop around for a plan.

Roger Furrer, executive director of Community Action, was tasked with helping nearly 40,000 uninsured Nebraskans navigate Obamacare. The group hired 62 "navigators" to educate Nebraskans and walk them through the enrollment process.

The folks who were doing this before Obamacare are unimpressed:

While the navigators say they are helping people by going door to door in their own neighborhoods, the insurance agents, who've been doing this job for decades, say they have concerns about the recently hired navigators.

"These navigators, number one, are not licensed insurance agents. Number two, they don't carry errors and emissions insurance. Number three, the navigators or organizations that receive the grants, are not performing background checks on the individuals that are going to have access to your personal, identifiable information," said Gabriel P. Janusa, President of Demand Insurance & Benefits, LLC in Metairie.

"They (the government officials) decided not to force them (navigators) to be licensed in the State of Louisiana through the Department of Insurance, because some of those people are felons. I can't be a felon and give you advice on their health care," explained Patrick Taylor, President of Benefit Planning Group in Metairie.

Louisiana navigators say they had required training. They studied the new law for as much as 15 hours on the internet and have a manual to look up answers to questions that might come up. They had to pass an extensive exam and are bound by strict rules.

Hey, 15 hours of training, a manual, and an extensive exam! Well, for most of them, anyway:

Two weeks after the launch of California's health insurance exchange, some of Covered California's navigators -- individuals tasked with educating residents about the state health insurance exchange -- still have not completed the certification process, NPR's "Shots" reports.

According to "Shots," some of the navigators have not:

Received state-issued licenses;

Completed training;

Undergone background checks; or

Received computer log-in information.

However, Peter Lee -- executive director of Covered California -- said that the exchange never expected to certify all of its navigators this early in the enrollment process.

Okay, maybe some others haven't finished training:

Planned Parenthood and Visiting Nurse Services of Iowa have been designated as the Navigators-Certified Application Counselors, for the 2010 Health Care Law known as "Obamacare" for Marion County. Marion County Public Health Director Kim Dorn says the navigators have not completed their training, though enrollment into the government exchanges began Oct. 1.

Okay, maybe some are giving out the wrong information:

A day after saying that anyone signing up for the Affordable Care Act had to provide their credit score, the lead Navigator admitted that she had been providing factually incorrect information to the public.

Anne Packham, one of the people assigned by the state to help people navigate the government's website, asserted in an interview on Tuesday -- and then later during follow up questions -- that the credit check was put in place so providers can make an educated decision about who to insure."

NRO