Be Careful What You Wish For

From Robert Laszewski’s Health Policy and Market blog:

The most urgent need is for the government to fix the back-end enrollment transactions between the government and the health insurance plans (the 834 problem). It will be impossible to conduct any kind of high volume enrollment through the health portal’s front door so long as the data being transmitted to the insurance companies is unreliable.

Has the government made progress in fixing the large variety of detailed 834 transaction issues?

Yes. But the progress so far is incremental and nowhere near enough to be able to go to high volume processing.

Healthcare.gov got something of a reprieve — a new & improved December 1 Grand Reopening day. That’s just 25 days from now, which isn’t a whole lot of time for “incremental” improvements.

But let us suppose that everything goes swimmingly at HHS over the next 25 days — they could become victims of their own (unlikely) success. Because if people are mad now that they can’t buy insurance, wait’ll they see the insurance they can buy.