Podcast Center
Video Center
Webcasts
Resource Center
Events
March 17, 2016 at 01:12 PM
Because of health and financial privacy concerns, managers of the public health insurance exchange system “data services hub” have been collecting too little information to analyze how well it is doing.
The hub is supposed to help HealthCare.gov and state-based Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) exchange programs determine whether individual applicants are eligible for exchange plan subsidies, by comparing the information applicants give with information from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and other services, Seto Bagdoyan, a director at the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), writes in a new report.
See also: Sebelius certifies exchange systems
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has no way to tell how many times agencies give relevant information through the hub in response to an exchange request, or how often agencies respond by saying no relevant information is available.
By design, CMS told GAO investigators, “The data hub does not store individual transactional data that could be collectively analyzed over time.”
CMS officials told the GAO that, “for policy reasons, the agency did not want the data hub to become a data repository itself, and, in particular, a repository of sensitive personal data.”
See also: Astrue blasts HHS watchdog
GAO could find data on how the exchange system handles known conflicts, or inconsistencies, by comparing the information applicants provided on their applications and the information coming from the verification sources.
CMS appears to have left inconsistencies for about 431,000 applications submitted in 2014 unresolved, Bagdoyan says. Those applications came from people who received about $1.7 billion in exchange plan subsidies.
Bagdoyan notes, for example, that CMS has decided against trying to resolve stand-alone Social Security number conflicts, in part because most Social Security number inconsistencies appear to be related to questions about citizenship or immigration status that will be resolved through other processes.
The GAO investigators found thousands of applications with stand-alone Social Security problems, Bagdoyan says. He says failing to resolve those inconsistencies could hurt IRS efforts to determine whether taxpayers have reported exchange plan premium tax credit information properly on their tax returns.
