State-Run Health Insurance Exchanges Showing Early Success

[brooklynite]

Source: Governing

While the federal government has grabbed headlines for slow enrollment in its health insurance exchanges, many state-based marketplaces have quietly amassed thousands of completed applications for coverage.

Smaller state-based exchanges in particular have shown early success, with Kentucky reporting 7,000 completed applications after two days, Hawaii posting totals of 1,200 in its first day and Connecticut announcing 1,000 since its exchange went online Oct. 1 along with most of the country. Meanwhile, the federal exchange serving as a marketplace for the 34 states that chose not to create their own systems isn’t releasing official enrollment data at this point.

The 16 states that chose to create their own exchanges have independent online insurance marketplaces that are independently developed, locally hosted and operated. Consumers living in the other states go to a single federally hosted web page, healthcare.gov.

Experts and officials are attributing the relative success of some state-based exchanges to simpler design, simpler services, more thorough testing, and the obvious—the federal government’s challenge of building both an information technolgoy infrastructure that can handle the volume of so many states along with a fully functioning web portal.

Read more: http://www.governing.com/news/state/gov-state-health-exchanges-better-than-federal.html

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I have employer insurance, but I signed into the NYS system to test it and had no problems yesterday finishing a registration and seeing the insurance options available.

[blm]

1. Good to hear this.

.

[BumRushDaShow]

2. "federal government’s challenge...infrastructure that can handle the volume of so many states"

And THAT is the bottom line - this is essentially the "pilot" for a "single-payer" portal by the brute-force handling of 36 states worth of simultaneous inquiries over a short window. Once folks have signed up and are up and running, then online account checks, etc., will be much less labor-intensive in terms of keeping the infrastructure up and running.

I am glad that those states with individual marketplaces are doing well and hope this trend continues. This suggests finding a way to leverage ideas of design and backoffice setups that might benefit all of the sites across the various states and the federal government.

[denverbill]

3. I got into CO's system the middle of last week.

I was curious about ours too but wanted to give it a few days to settle in. I had absolutely no problem signing in and getting a quote. I didn't create an account or anything, but response time was excellent. The rates were higher than I hoped, but since my wife and I are both over 55, we are probably in the highest rate group.

[closeupready]

4. ditto brooklynite - the site worked perfectly for me yesterday.

From my perusal of the available options, it seems like while still expensive, at least there are decent plans available.

[Auntie Bush]

5. Would you have gotten cheaper insurance with the state than through your employer?

[brooklynite]

6. In all probability no...

NYS employees have a plan that's fairly generous.