HealthCare.Gov: Tens Of Thousands Of Reported Mistakes Remain Uncorrected

The Washington Post reports: “Tens of thousands of people who discovered that HealthCare.gov made mistakes as they were signing up for a health plan are confronting a new roadblock: The government cannot yet fix the errors.”

Roughly 22,000 Americans have filed appeals with the government to try to get mistakes corrected, according to internal government data obtained by The Washington Post. They contend that the computer system for the new federal online marketplace charged them too much for health insurance, steered them into the wrong insurance program or denied them coverage entirely.

For now, the appeals are sitting, untouched, inside a government computer. And an unknown number of consumers who are trying to get help through less formal means — by calling the health-care marketplace directly — are told that HealthCare.gov’s computer system is not yet allowing federal workers to go into enrollment records and change them, according to individuals inside and outside the government who are familiar with the situation.

Aside from the 22,000 who have complained (so far) that they are being charged too much, given the wrong policies, etc., there is a serious legal issue involving the government not meeting its legal obligations.

In recent weeks, legal advocates have been pressing administration officials, pointing out that rules for the online marketplace, created by the 2010 Affordable Care Act, guarantee due-process rights to timely hearings for Americans who think they have been improperly denied insurance or subsidies.

But at the moment, “there is no indication that infrastructure . . . necessary for conducting informal reviews and fair hearings has even been created, let alone become operational,” attorneys at the National Health Law Program said in a late-December letter to leaders of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the agency that oversees HealthCare.gov.

Actually, it’s hard to see why this is a problem. All CMS has to do is phone the president (that’s what his famous governing phone is for, isn’t it?) and ask him to use his governing pen the same way he’s used it so many times before: just waive the pesky appeal provisions of his law until such time as they cease to be inconvenient. And while he’s at it he could simply order all those “bad apple” insurers to charge the new enrollees whatever the enrollees claim they should be charged, ignoring the presumably unreliable information on their application forms provided to the insurers by HealthCare.Gov.