Frustrated consumers aren’t the only ones with complaints about HealthCare.gov.
Exchange officials are trying to deal with a whole slew of continuing complaints from carriers about the flawed health care website.
Plan management concerns surface in a large batch of HealthCare.gov ”war room” notes posted earlier this week by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
Aetna — a major exchange plan provider — tried to get some high-level attention from exchange managers Oct. 4 by sending an e-mail to plan account managers — not the HealthCare.gov helpdesk — listing at least 18 issues that the helpdesk had not addressed.
“One of their complaints was an inability to reach the helpdesk,” according to members of the HealthCare.gov team.
The Oversight Committee included the memo containing that comment in a collection of notes created from Oct. 1, when the HealthCare.gov enrollment system opened to the public, through Oct. 29.
Some of the notes in the collection came from a “war room” for the entire Center for Consumer Information & Insurance Oversight — the arm of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services responsible for overseeing the entire PPACA exchange program and managing the day-to-day operations of 36 HHS-run exchanges.
Other notes came from a war room created especially for the team in charge of “qualified health plans” — the commercial insurance plans that carriers are trying to sell through the exchanges.
The federal exchange carriers have a contract that limits what they can say about exchange activity and exchange problems, according to press reports. Few have given many details about their experiences with the exchange system.