As House Republicans continue to look for ways to use federal budget negotiations to trap the new public exchanges in the womb, the exchange builders have been organizing exchange birth events.
Managers of Covered California, the Golden State’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) exchange, scheduled five public media events for Tuesday, the official exchange program birthday.
The exchange media staff promised that Covered California board members would be available to “mark this historic day” in Fresno, Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Diego and San Francisco.
The day before, Covered California staffers drew a large online crowd by holding a live Webcast to show people the exchange enrollment system.
The staffers may have gotten more audience interest in contact information fields and remarks such as, “Now I’ll enter their Social Security number” than anyone else will ever get ever again.
Creators of private health insurance exchange programs continued to try to siphon off some of the media frenzy life force from the birth of the PPACA exchange program and use it to get attention for their well-established private exchange programs, which, in many cases, offer a wide range of insurance products, not just health insurance, and offer a much wider range of health insurers and plan options.
Liazon Corp., for example, reported that more than 200 employers have signed up to use its private exchange program already this year, increasing its total employer count to 2,400.
The public exchanges have been trying to win broker support.