Friday, December 6, 2013

Anthem says Kynect has delivered inaccurate enrollment forms, but is nevertheless a model for insurance exchanges

Some health-insurance companies say Kentucky's Kynect exchange for acquiring coverage is giving them inaccurate or incomplete enrollment forms, and that is also a problem in other state-operated exchanges, Kyle Cheney and Jason Millman reported for Politico Dec. 4.

"It’s a new twist in the unfolding saga of so-called 834 forms — industry jargon for the application files that insurers receive when someone signs up for coverage through an exchange," the reporters write. "Insurers in Kentucky and New York, for example, say they’ve received flawed 834 enrollment forms from their local exchanges, though the extent of the errors is unclear. Washington state has already had to correct thousands of 834s with faulty information about federal tax credits. . . . It’s uncertain how deep the problems go, in part, because the states themselves aren’t sure — and are reluctant to divulge much about their technical challenges."

As for Kentucky specifically, "Although a Kynect spokeswoman said the exchange has dealt with only 'minor issues' since it started sending enrollment files to insurers a month ago, she didn’t indicate whether those issues had resulted in flawed forms or if they’d been resolved."

Tony Felts, a Kentucky spokesman for Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield, told Politico that it's too early to say if the problems have been solved: “In general, the situation is the same for the state-run exchanges as it is for the federally facilitated exchanges. As far as the quality of the data that’s coming in, I can’t say that everything has been completely accurate.” Still, he told Kentucky Health News Dec. 9, "There is no question that Kentucky's exchange is performing substantially better and is a model for how the exchanges could be running."

Robert Zirkelbach, spokesman for America’s Health Insurance Plans, a lobbying group, told Politico, “While there is significant variation from state to state, health plans in many state-based exchanges are seeing similar problems with enrollment files.” (Read more)

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