HealthCare.gov Can't Handle Appeals of Errors

PapayaSF writes "The Washington Post reports that roughly 22,000 people have claimed they were charged too much, steered into the wrong insurance program, or denied coverage, but the HealthCare.gov website cannot handle appeals. They've filled out seven-page forms and mailed them to a federal contractor's office in Kentucky, where they were scanned and entered, but workers at CMS cannot read them because that part of the system has not been built. Other missing aspects are said to have higher priorities: completing the electronic payment system for insurers, the connections with state Medicaid programs, and the ability to adjust coverage to accommodate major changes such as new babies. People with complaints about mistakes have been told to 'return to the Web site and start over.'"

Comments

Coders

[Stolzy]

Maybe they should have hired actual coders to do the job.

Re:Coders

[lgw]

It always seemed to me that people who insist on the distinction are missing the fact that it's the "coding" part of the job that matters in the end. Yes, it's good to have a sane design and so on, but that only has value because it makes for better code. And save me from architecture astronauts who don't write code any more, and so produce designs of no value whatsoever.

And all that being said ...

[Daniel Dvorkin]

... I personally know several people, in several states that have not established their own exchanges, who have signed up for "Obamacare" using the federal site and are now taking advantage of much better coverage, at a much lower price, than they could have received before the ACA went into effect. The problems are real and clearly need to be fixed, but beware of confirmation bias--every single problem is going to get lots of press, while successes go unnoticed because they don't fit the "if it bleeds, it leads" paradigm.