Fewer than 1 percent of the people who learned they are eligible to buy health insurance plans on the Massachusetts Health Connector have taken the next critical step: paying for their coverage.
Connector officials said that is to be expected, because the bills for 2015 coverage are not due until Dec. 23.
But the Massachusetts Association of Health Plans has raised concerns about the low enrollment numbers, as the Connector braces for the challenge of getting people who applied for coverage to select plans and pay for them.
The Connector website has successfully determined what coverage about 150,000 people are eligible for — a task last year’s dysfunctional website could do for no one.
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Created by state law in 2006, the Connector needed to upgrade its website last year to comply with the federal Affordable Care Act. The software failed disastrously, and much of the past year has been devoted to adapting software by the Virginia tech company hCentive to build a working website for Massachusetts.
The new website, launched Nov. 15, has functioned well so far, but its ultimate success depends on getting health insurance cards into the hands of consumers.
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| CLICK CHART to ENLARGE. Interactive version of Graph can be found HERE |
In the first 25 days of open enrollment, 68,100 people have been enrolled in MassHealth, the state’s Medicaid program.
An additional 79,464 have learned they are eligible to buy private insurance purchase through the Connector, with about 60 percent qualifying for federal or state subsidies. It is the people with private insurance who pay premiums.
But only 3,729 have paid their first month’s premiums. ...Read the full story HERE.
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