'Routine' updates frustrate MNsure clients

Is your baby married?

It's a ridiculous question. But if you just had a baby and went to MNsure to update your family status, the health exchange website may ask you anyway.

That kind of routine update is proving to be a big problem for MNSure and the Minnesotans using it to buy health coverage.

Related coverage:
• August 2014: Health care success forces Uptown clinic to close
• July 2014: GOP candidates for governor want MNsure changes
• January 2014: Dayton takes responsibility for troubled rollout

Clients dealing with life changing events — a new baby, the death of a spouse, divorce, the loss of employer-sponsored health coverage — are allowed to change their health plans without waiting for the next sign-up period. But nearly a year after its beleaguered rollout, MNsure's making it a lot harder than it should be to make those basic changes, observers say.

One example: It used to take five minutes to add a baby to a plan under Medical Assistance, Minnesota's version of Medicaid, but now that Medical Assistance runs through MNsure it takes about 45 minutes and "you have to say whether or not a baby is married," said Dakota County director of employment and economic assistance Marti Fischbach, who helps clients sign up for plans.

"It's much more cumbersome right now than ideally it needs to be over the longer term."

MNsure officials promise their website will work better. But they acknowledge glitches with client updates and other problems won't be solved by the next open enrollment period, which begins in mid-November.

MNsure Chief Operating Officer Katie Burns on Wednesday admitted there are still major problems with entering life event changes. Much of the work is not automated and data must be entered manually, she told the MNsure board.

"It's much more cumbersome right now than ideally it needs to be over the longer term," she said.

The agency has added three dozen staff to work on the life event backlog and is making headway, MNsure chief executive Scott Leitz said. "We're working really hard to clear up all of the backlog of individuals who had a life event situation, to ensure that they're into coverage."

The agency still expects "curveballs," but the MNsure system has improved enough that, unlike last year, staffers won't be encountering a curveball every second, he added.

A MNsure spokesman says more than 10,000 of those data entry backlogs have been resolved but about 3,500 remain. And there have been tens of thousands for the MinnesotaCare subsidized insurance program.

Fischbach said her staff couldn't enter new babies at all for the first five months of MNsure. That led to a backlog of about 80 newborn enrollees. They eventually made it in, she said.

The goal should be a much more streamlined, automated system, Fischbach added.

"There's steps that would be eliminated if all the characteristics of a baby were in place," she said. "But since those characteristics aren't in place, you're going through every possible person indicator, and so that might include marriage for a baby."