More people enroll in health plans through MNsure, but private insurers have complaints

The state's online insurance website, MNsure, has seen dramatic increases in public and private health plan enrollments over the past several days.

But one insurance carrier, Ucare, is complaining that MNsure's problems providing reliable information on consumers is placing the health plan at a competitive disadvantage.

Joel Ulland, assistant director for legislative affairs for Ucare, told the MNsure board on Wednesday that his company has received no workable data from the exchange and cannot issue new policies.

"This puts Ucare in an awkward position," Ulland said. "We're responding to customer service calls from our new enrollees. They are looking for member ID cards, they are looking for other information for coverage that's effective on January 1 of 2015 and we don't know who they are."

The good news for MNsure and its budget is that the agency received an expected surge in health plan sign-ups in the run up to the original Monday deadline for consumers to enroll in coverage so that it is effective Jan. 1. The agency has pushed the deadline back to Saturday.

MNsure reported a 32 percent jump in total enrollments between Saturday and Tuesday. Enrollment in commercial plans premium jumped 40 percent during those four days. Total enrollment of more than 49,000 so far is split about evenly between private and government-sponsored plans.

CEO Scott Leitz told board members that MNsure's systems are stable and holding up despite the surge in enrollments — a far cry from the troubles the website had last year.

"The nice thing is that given the volume that we've been getting both on the call center side but then also through website traffic performance has been pretty good," Leitz said.

While the agency's call center and the software appear to functioning well, MNsure officials acknowledged that the agency has had difficulty providing individual enrollment information to insurance carriers. An automatic process to transfer the data still doesn't work.

Ulland, of Ucare, also expressed concern that information on cancellations isn't available. He said that might lead to some customers getting charged next year for both their new health plan and the one they left. That scenario, Ulland said, could really hurt customers.

"We know that many of our members do not have a lot of extra money sitting in their checking account," he said. "An extra withdrawal could lead to members seeing unexpected overdrafts in their checking account."

Despite the data transfer problems Ucare is urging MNsure to further extend its enrollment deadline beyond Saturday. The company is only offering plans though the exchange and said having its sales cut off on Saturday when commercial carriers are selling outside of the exchange through Dec. 31 puts Ucare at a competitive disadvantage.

MNsure announced no change to its new deadline of Saturday. But Leitz said a change is not out of the question.

But some oppose another extension, including John Freeman, lead navigator for Health Access Minnesota, which helps people find coverage on MNsure.

Freeman welcomed the extension of the deadline from midnight Monday until Saturday afternoon. He said the extra days are allowing Health Access to help more people make it through the process of getting insurance through MNsure.

But he said another extension is a bad idea given the problems insurance companies are having obtaining the information they need.

"I'd prefer that it stay at the 20th at this point because I think it does give us ample time to get people through the process," Freeman said.