Insurers are rushing to gather health information from the new customers they won on public marketplaces in a high-stakes outreach effort crucial to their hopes of profiting from the health-care law.
Health plans need to know the health status of those signing up for coverage so they can project whether the costs are likely to outrun the premiums coming in. That information will be critical in figuring out prices for next year, among other things. But, under the law's new rules, enrollees don't have to disclose pre-existing conditions to buy insurance.
Insurers still generally have only early signals, including age and gender, on the four million people who federal regulators say have signed up so far for marketplace coverage. Those details don't paint a full picture of the insurers' potential risk and may even be misleading. That's partly because the young people who sign up for health coverage may be those more likely to have serious medical needs, insurance-industry officials say.
To fill in the blanks, insurers are calling, emailing and writing letters to new enrollees, urging them to divulge information about their conditions, prescriptions and even personal habits, often through online forms called health-risk assessments that have long been used in employer-sponsored wellness programs.
"Day one, we're starting to take a look at these individuals," said Betsy LaForge, an executive at Blue Cross & Blue Shield of North Carolina, which is offering $50 gift cards good at various retailers to enrollees who fill out the assessments. "Every place we can start to quickly assess, does this membership look like our typical membership, or is it different, we're doing that." The North Carolina insurer isn't disclosing how many marketplace plans it has sold. (emphasis mine)read the rest of the story HERE.
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