Another expert, Nancy Thompson of CBIZ Benefits & Insurance Services, said "no one had the crystal ball" that predicted just how dire the enrollment levels and data problems in enrollment files would be at this point, more than two months after Obamacare launched. "Let's face it, with the number of uninsured that we have in the United States, for us to be sitting [at less than 400,000 enrolled], that's staggeringly low," said Thompson, senior vice president and sales director at CBIZ.
"The bigger concern is, what kind of individuals are enrolling," Thompson said, echoing Tiede's concern about adverse selection. "The low enrollment numbers could absolutely play havoc on the rating structure."
Thompson noted that when they designed their plans and set premium prices for 2014 for the Obamacare exchanges, the exchanges had never enrolled anyone, so there was no data to use to predict who would enroll, and what their level of benefit use would look like.
Now, with low enrollment levels overall nationally, and with the assumption that a disproportionate number of people who did enroll were previously uninsurable because of pre-existing health conditions, "there's no doubt that some of [the insurers] missed the mark when they set rating structures," Thompson said.
An estimated 10 percent of all enrollments now being made on the federal Obamacare marketplace contain data errors that could delay people from actually getting health coverage, officials disclosed Friday.
And that error rate for enrollments submitted via HealthCare.gov and then sent to insurers before December was an estimated 25 percent, officials revealed.
The rate fell in the past week, officials said, because of repair efforts to HealthCare.gov's, particular the discovery and fix of one particular software problem that was causing an estimated 80 percent of data errors, officials said.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnbc.com ...
