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About 25% of HealthCare.gov Applications Have Errors
itwbennett writes "An estimated one in four user applications sent from HealthCare.gov to insurance providers have errors introduced by the website, an official with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said during a press briefing Friday. The errors include missing forms, duplicate forms and incorrect information in the applications, such as wrong information about an applicant's marital status, said Julie Bataille, communications director for HHS Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). While the software bugs leading to the errors have largely been fixed, as many as 10 percent of insurance applications may still have errors and consumers who have used HealthCare.gov to buy insurance and have concerns that their applications haven't been processed or have errors should contact their insurers, Bataille said."
Well, the numbers are meaningless without context. What is the percentage of normal insurance forms that have errors on them?
You can keep your errors.
Period.
An estimated one in four user applications sent from HealthCare.gov to insurance providers have errors introduced by the website
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
It's my understanding that this is happening with no user error at all. It's as if they load all the information into a database then when you select a plan, it retrieves the information and places what it thinks it needs on the forms it thinks it needs and that is where the errors are occurring. So it would actually be the website's problem as it attempts to collect the information and place it into the application forms as needed and failing there.
I don't think users can make the system to send duplicate form pages.
problem is with the way it sends the info to the insurers.. it's like faxing them over email.
oh and a fairy simple fix would have been while at it to overhaul the whole system. why? so that it doesn't matter to the "basic care for everyone rates" at all what your marital status is or if you were born in compton. for extra insurances you could then visit the insurers.. but hey,if it's worth being proud of a country where it matters into which family you were born then fuck it I suppose - because that's what private healthcare does.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Strange, TFA as well as the summary seem to imply that the users are entering faulty information into the forms or failing to enter any information into some forms, and that is what is causing the problems.
By this point, I think people generally understand that Healthcare.gov is to be avoided if at all possible. This system of systems is a monster (reportedly 500 million lines of code at 60-70% completion), and it's probably too big to test -- testing might take longer than it took to write, i.e., the QA death spiral.
The only reason to use the exchange is to get a subsidy. If you are a normal taxpayer who won't qualify for one, go off-exchange.
Or, join a religious health care pool, which are medical cost-sharing plans that are exempt from the law.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Is this after correcting against how many would have errors if they were filed directly? I'm willing to bet that direct applications contain a similar number of inaccuracies, so what's the news here?
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Introduced by the website seems to imply they are because of the website. Both the article and summery say that.
Now from what I have been told, you don't fill out specific forms. You enter specific information into the website and it fills the forms out for you based on the plans you pick. It is supposed to stop you from filling forms out incorrectly or getting confused on wording and so on. It also allows you to do direct comparisons without having to fill 20 forms out for 10 different providers offering 2 plans each.
Oh, my mistake then. I was under the impression that the end users filled out forms on the website, and were missing some or incorrectly filling them out, leading to an error.
Better them than me. Talk about an ugly technical job.
Strange, TFA as well as the summary seem to imply that the users are entering faulty information into the forms or failing to enter any information into some forms, and that is what is causing the problems.
Failed reading comprehension in elementary/primary school didn't you? The summary and article both state the erroers have been caused by the Healthcare.gov system not the health insurance applicants.
Oh, my mistake then.
"If you like your mistake, you can keep it."
Obamacare was rushed out, without any testing, and it's a new application for them. Of course it will have all the hallmarks of a version 1.0 release . . . like plenty of errors. Most wise IT folks always wait for the second or third release of a product before using it.
Except with Obamacare, it's the law that you have to use the 1.0 buggy release.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
It's not even v1.0 yet. It's still in alpha stage at best!
Life is not for the lazy.
By this point, I think people generally understand that Healthcare.gov is to be avoided if at all possible. This system of systems is a monster (reportedly 500 million lines of code at 60-70% completion), and it's probably too big to test -- testing might take longer than it took to write, i.e., the QA death spiral.
I fail to see what a large codebase has to do with end users using or not using it.
The only reason to use the exchange is to get a subsidy. If you are a normal taxpayer who won't qualify for one, go off-exchange.
Why wouldn't somebody want to compare plans and prices available off-exchange with those in the exchange, exactly?
I don't respond to AC's.
We don't have to excuse them, we can demand they anticipate these things and provide for it. They seems to have an idea of these issues, with their plans to create a cadre of "navigators" to help people with internet access and web site help. But the plan and law was heavily politicized, 36 states refused to set up their own exchanges and dumped all of them on the federal exchange. Millions of people who would have gone to medicaid are dumped into exchanges because they refused to expand medicaid.
No doubt there were self inflicted wounds. Politicians scared of people getting sticker shock, insisted on disabling the window shop and see full price option at roll out, That was the root cause of disaster. The first thing the "tech surge" did was to enable window shopping. It was enabled as early as Oct 15, I tested it then, They could not have done it that soon if it was fresh code. Window shopping was the original code, They just disabled the meddling by the politicians and went on the original code path.
Still they are doing it in the right order. Get people to commit to a plan before the dead line. Errors on the back end can be sorted out when they actually file claims,
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Delta. Remember, there's an entire back end that hasn't even hit testing.
what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul. ~
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
This post is the best example of an apologist with no logic or facts for backup.
No. They awarded a known incompetent company with a record of bad projects with a non-compete contract. Then they paid them ONE HALF OF A BILLION DOLLARS for a shitty website and aren't asking for a fucking refund.
Part of the 25% error rate is apparently the Feds double-sending a form. That's not a good thing, but it's not like the insurer can't do it's job just because it has two identical copies of one of your forms. If the forms are different, and include important info, the double-copies could be a huge problem, but the article doesn't give us any way to tell how many of these 25% error are actually errors vs. how many are conservatives in the insurance industry bitching that their guy got whipped in November of 2012.
More importantly the data is old. There were 834 errors in forms sent prior to the big relaunch, which works out to a 25% error rate, and indicates that roughly 3,336 actually managed to get the website to tell them it worked in October/November; but pretty much the entire reason we had a relaunch was that the site sucked. The current error rate in the article is 0.77%. It's probable that number will go up, as most of that actual humans who've used the site haven't sen the copies of the forms sent to the insurance companies yet, maybe by an order of magnitude (ie: 8% error rate), but so far the relaunched website seems to be doing OK.
It seems like you are conflating the website with the law. You do have to get insurance, but you do not have to use the website.
I waited until the last minute because 'fuck the government' right? But when I did call, I got a really nice lady that walked me through the whole process in less than 30 minutes. They basically ask you the questions from the forms (the forms are also available to fill out yourself and mail in. Forms link, and instructions link)
I have a family of 4 and we'll end up paying $74.00 per month for Blue Cross Silver plan. It's better than what I have right now through Blue Cross, and I've been paying $400 a month for it.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
Two points:
1) This is a long-term program, not a short-term war. Social Security/Medicare/etc. all had some disasters at roll-out. Once the disasters were fixed the program started running and have kept running pretty much unchanged. OTOH, the whole point of winning a war is that the war ends. the government program funding said war gets to go away, and everyone goes home.
2) Don't worry. There are plenty of conservative think-tanks in DC. There're probably more conservative think-tanks then liberal ones because a) conservative activists don't want to work for anything but a think tank, a campaign, or the policy staff of a right-wing elected official (OTOH liberal activists will happily take jobs in Academia and/or the government) and b) conservative donors think that non-think-tank sources of info are biased against conservatives therefore they give the Heartland Institute big money donations.
As for the "kickbacks," you're quoting something that is totally made-up. The company that designed the website gave as much to the Romney as Obama.
I was thinking of changing my Major Medical plan, because it is getting expensive. It has literally doubled in price in the last three years. I went to ehealthinsurance.com, which is where I normally shop for insurance. I found that the cheapest premium is about the same as I am paying now, meaning that insurance rates really have gone up by 100% in the last three years. Probably due to some sort of new legislation.
Even worse, I was comparing if my plan started now. If I started a new plan in 2014, the lowest cost plan is 50% MORE than I am paying now. That would mean that insurance rates have tripled in three years.
My company just switched insurance plans to a much more expensive plan for the full family option. It is more than $1,300 a month. I won't be participating, of course, since much cheaper plans are available individually. I wonder if my employer gets their kickback per individual, or is it just for signing up the company? If it is per individual, I will probably expect some retribution for not using the plan.
Anyway, I question how some of the lower paid full timers can afford this. After the cost of the insurance plan, dental and FICA, they are probably only going to be taking home a few hundred dollars a month at best.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
The root cause of the problem is that Republicans dominate very small states with very large percentage of poor people. For example South Carolina had about 150K people already eligible for medicaid but were unaware of it. Even though the Republicans refused to expand medicare, the medicare rolls are expected to swell by 150K, because they are just finding out that they are actually eligible, and if they don't enroll for free healthcare, they would end up paying a fine! There are another 350K people who would know that they are within 400% of the poverty level, eligible for subsidies, and the Governor refused to give them access to that money. The hospitals and providers are going to lose about a billion dollars of federal money. Romney won that state by a margin of 2.2%. NC has 4.7 million registered voters, Romney's margin in raw votes is just 100K. If the potential loss of medical coverage or the possibility of getting subsidy impels a fraction of this 500K who are not already voting Democrat to register to vote, or actually show up to vote or switch from R to D, that would be disastrous to the Republicans.
If a dilettante like me crunches numbers like this, the politicians have at least semi or deci Nate Silvers in their pay roll. They know what is coming down the pike. Sure you could decry it as a simple vote getting ploy by the Democrats. And you could rail about the unfunded expansion and the effect it is going to have in the deficits etc etc. You could shout till cow comes home, "if people vote themselves benefits without worrying about the costs, Democracy will die". But if Republicans do not find a way to pacify that section of the population, none of these intellectual arguments are going to sway the people who are sick and tired of being sick and tired.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
This also would have given a lot of supporters with subsidy eligibility certificate in hand, willing to contact their senators and representatives asking them to support ACA. This is a grave and stupid political mistake by the Democrats. And they are paying the price for it.
But in the long run, people already having medical coverage through employer or through medicare would not change their vote because of ACA. Democrats would continue to support it, probably bemoaning not implementing single payer or public option. Republicans won't gain too many votes from that group. But from the 40 million people without health care, people eligible for medicare and people below 400% of poverty level (that is nearly 90K AGI for a family of four) eligible for subsidies, there is going to be solid vote gain for Democrats. And most of it will happen in solidly red states because they have the largest percentage of poor people.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
They're not actually talking about human data entry errors. The problem is with the EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) documents used to communicate between sysmems. "834" is an EDI document type related to the health care industry. My current gig (no, not health care) has me dealing with EDI quite frequently. It's difficult to get right. Even getting your hands on the standards for a particular documentation type, vendors rarely follow the standards, and commercial libraries for mapping data in and out of EDI format mostly suck.
I think one of the big issues that will be coming forward due to Obamacare is that the definition if rich is going to change. Obama has always said the rich are going to "pay their fair share" for healthcare so the poor can be covered.
It's just that a lot of people who don't think they're rich at all are finding out that Obama thinks they are and he is making them pay.
The 25% error rate in so-called 834 transmissions is a "preliminary" estimate of the website's performance between its launch Oct. 1 and Nov. 30
0.77% is just for the past week.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
It seems like you are conflating the website with the law. You do have to get insurance, but you do not have to use the website.
If you are entitled to a subsidy, the website is the only way to get it. Direct applications to insurers won't receive one.
The problem with a) Checks and Balances, b) powerful individual congressman, and c) a massively diverse country is that major overhauls of entire policy areas are virtually impossible.
For example let's say you just want to get Federal per capita health spending below Canada's, because the federal government in Canada is the only spending on healthcare which should be (in theory) a lot cheaper then the various systems our Federal government uses to insure less then half of the country. That probably requires giving people on the VA system the same insurance options as over-65s. But if you do that a lot of veterans are gonna worry that their care will get worse because VA-System enrollees are happier then medicare enrollees. Some over-65s will freak out because at that age group there is a very vocal cohort of People Who Hate Change On Principle. Which means some Congressman will bring up questions, because it is pretty much his entire job to bring up questions like that, and the rest of Congress will go along with him because a) Seniors always vote, and b) no politician wants to be the guy accused of screwing veterans. Cue Congressional Check of Presidential proposal.
If you overhauled the private insurance system it would be even worse because most Americans a) receive health insurance from their employers, and are b) convinced that it is not only above-average when compared to other employer plans, it is also better then all other possible options. When Clinton tried that shit it didn't even get past Committee.
Thus you have Obamacare, which tries to merge several disparate insurance markets (Congressional healthcare, the Individual Market, and Hi-Risk Pools) nobody was particularly attached to. It could in the future include several markets that some users (but under half) like -- Medicaid, the Small Group market -- with an option that people like but is basically already Obamacare (Federal Employees already use Exchanges similar to to healthcare.gov).
If you want a government system that runs like an engineer would want a government to run you probably need to steal the Westminster System used by the UK, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada, etc. There's one guy. He's Prime Minister. He's in charge or he isn't. If he disagrees with you, tough. Your choices are a) convince Parliament to fire him and force new elections, or b) wait for new elections. This whole Obama-spends-15-months-minorly-reforming-healthcare-then-spends-40-arguing-with-Republicans-about-it just doesn't happen. There's no bribes to be extracted in the vote-to-call-the question in the Senate. There's no filibuster. There's no endless committee hearings where powerful people posture for the camera. There's no such thing as a Westminster-system pol who supports part of the PM's program and votes against the rest.
Hell, in Canada Parliament is even less of a check on the government then I've implied. You can't run for election as an MP unless your party leader signs your nomination papers, and if you're in government that's the Prime Minister.
You'd have to be a complete doofus to use that site. Don't give your personal and private information to a site that has zero security.
The relaunch was on Saturday November 30th. It's Saturday December 7th. The entire post-relaunch period is last week.
This article is like bitching about how terrible Windows 3.11 was the week after MS launched Windows 95. No shit 8 days ago Windows sucked, that's why they re-did the damn thing.
Now you know that's not true. The article and summary specifically make it clear that bad information is being input by users
You are welcome on my lawn.
Ah! I misread your "pre-relaunch" as "pre-launch." Apologies.
Replacing "have" with "had" in the summary and title does put a rather different spin on things.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
It's not the rich that have to pay their fair share now. Now the healthy have to pay their fair share. I've never been able to figure out what a "fair share" is. No one ever seems to be able to objectively define that term. It's always more for some, less for others, and we never seem to get to the point where we can say we have achieved fairness. I'm starting to believe that a "fair share" doesn't actually exist, and it's just a device that get used to create jealousy and buy votes from people who are easily persuaded.
We're just dying to try out version 2.0. Preferably 2.0.1 where they have the bugs worked out.
From what i understand, a lot of that cost was infrastructure, not code. That can be reused even if the application was burnt to the ground and started fresh.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
That sounds like a great deal if you live clean anyway. If you don't drink much, don't plan on getting pregnant, and don't care for routine examinations it's a great deal - just like the cheaper health insurance plans that are now illegal.
As for the "scare" from your link, it was one case where the company decided it could not legally provide insurance in the state where the people lived - unfortunate but not really a company issue. And an arbitration panel agreed with that assessment when challenged, You prefer to believe the state that claimed it never blocked them from providing coverage, even though the state as just as mud a PR interest in looking good as the company.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
No, the article and summery make it clear the errors they are talking about are introduced by the website. Read the entire sentence being used to discover the meaning of what is being said.
Totally agree that "fair share" is a very effective political tool and almost impossible to define.
There's a big difference between being $15k in the hole and 100s of thousands if dollars in the hole. When you talk about pre ACA medical bankruptcies you're talking about big money. A $15k debt is something most people could manage. And if they can't manage it then they shouldn't buy a Bronze plan.
When you equate taxation with armed robbery, you disagree with Jesus about paying unto Caesar what was Caesar's. When our founding father's declared "No taxation without representation", they did what Jesus did not do. Jesus never questioned the right of the Romans to rule Judea. Realize too Jesus did not talk about liberty and pursuit of happiness. Of course with a PhD in theology you could dredge up little known, and never preached and never sermonized sections of the bible to argue he did too. But that would open a new set of problems and even more convoluted explanations.
Anyway, from the passages you quoted, it looks like divorce should be illegal. I only know of Catholics still trying to enforce it, and even they create a loop hole called post facto annulment of marriages, which makes the couple's married life a life of sin retroactively! And Jacob marries both Rachel and Leia, so you demand a religious exemption from polygamy laws too? And they were his first cousins too. So you want to revisit incest definitions of American laws too?
BTW do you realize the most basic passages of the ten commandments implicitly permit slavery? Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's man slave nor the woman slave? Current versions use the term "man servant" and "woman servant", and argue the terms "slaves" were mis-translations. But remember the bloodiest war that killed more Americans than all other wars put together was fought because some Christian imams ruled that slavery was halal for Christians. Just think how many things you are currently holding and fighting for might be ruled mis-translations by your future imams and bishops.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact