Obamacare has failed my family
It just keeps getting worse
The Obamacare debacle remains … well, a debacle.
At a time when I should have my family’s insurance coverage locked up for 2014, I learned this morning that — despite previous assurances from the government’s call center — my application for coverage has not been completed or submitted to AmeriHealth.
Let’s start at November 13, when I attempted to finally enroll via healthcare.gov and over the phone.
Even though I had completed all of the necessary steps to that point, the site didn’t work that day and locked my account — allowing me to do nothing more on the healthcare.gov site. I called the call center, who couldn’t even find me in the system — despite the fact I had an account, had selected an insurer and clicked enroll.
They discovered my family in the system once they figured out healthcare.gov had determined my 8-year-old son was the head of the household. The call center operator said we couldn’t do anything until he gave me permission to access the account (he was in school, so that wasn’t happening).
Once they found me and I convinced them I wouldn’t be calling my son’s school for permission, however, they couldn’t access my account because healthcare.gov was down. She advised me to call the insurer to see if they had received my application.
The insurer helpfully said that they wouldn’t even receive the application for three to six weeks after it was submitted via healthcare.gov — which, at best, put us at early December and at worst past the deadline to have insurance on January 1.
Informed of this development, the call center representative apologized and suggested I call back once the website was up and running again — which I did last Monday (November 18). During that call, they were able to access my information and I was assured that my enrollment was being taken care of and it would be submitted once it was processed — leading to this conversation:
“How will I know it is submitted?”
“It just will be,” the call center representative said.
“I’m sorry, I’m just not comfortable with that. I really need to know that it’s submitted.”
“Well, they are reviewing it now, and if there are any issues, they will call you,” she said.
“Who?”
“The people reviewing it,” she answered.
“Who is that?”
“The people,” she said.
“Well, then.”
So, nine days later, I hadn’t received a call, so I attempted to log in to healthcare.gov to see if there was an update to my application.
This is what I was greeted with:
Discouraged, I called the call center again. The first call, the operator sounded like she was in a wind tunnel, so I called back and explained all of the above to the very polite call center operator.
After a few minutes of looking at my account, he told me that it remained locked. He also told me that nothing had done with my application due to technical issues that caused it to remain locked.
“But I was told last call that it was being reviewed and would be submitted.”
“Who did they say was reviewing it?” he asked.
“The people.”
“What people?” he asked.
“Exactly.”
Stuck at that impasse, he said that he would send the information to the technical people (more “people”) who could quickly resolve it and allow me to access my account and complete the necessary steps.
“So what should I do now? When should I try?”
“Well, log out and try again in a few hours,” he said.
“I am logged out because the site isn’t working again.”
“Good,” he said. “Stay logged out and then try again later.”
In short, it is all but impossible we will have insurance in place through the federal exchange by January 1 — even with the very generous eight-day extension.
Which makes what Paul Krugman had to say in the New York Times all the more amusing:
Conservatives are operating on the assumption that it’s an irredeemable disaster that they can ride all the way to 2016; but the facts on the ground are getting better by the day, and Obamacare will turn into a Benghazi-type affair where Republicans are screaming about a scandal nobody else cares about.
And it’s already starting to happen.
Yes, Paul, it is clear you and the wine-swilling set don’t really care about our problems. But the problems are real — and they will have consequences, economically, medically, and politically.
