Healthcare.gov STILL Failing the American People

The delays, glitches and all-out failures of the Heatlhcare.gov rollout have been well documented. The problem is, there are still major problems, problems that are leaving more than 20,000 people who signed up in limbo.

Tens of thousands of people who discovered that HealthCare.gov made mistakes as they were signing up for a health plan are confronting a new roadblock: The government cannot yet fix the errors.

Roughly 22,000 Americans have filed appeals with the government to try to get mistakes corrected…

This isn’t just a “they misspelled my middle name” error. This is the government’s health care system charging them too much, enrolling them in the wrong insurance program or simply denying them the coverage they were promised time and time again. It seems that the Healthcare.gov system is not able to edit enrollment records.

Apparently the government can force you to sign up for Obamacare, but they can’t fix any of the mistakes they made in the process.

The Washington Post spoke to Addie Wilson, a 27-year old woman from West Virginia who is facing a deductible $4000 too high and a monthly premium $100 more than it should be. The feds have little sympathy for her situation (a problem that they created), telling her to “pay the full price now and appeal later.”

Of course she is unable to do that.

The Obama administration has not made public the fact that the appeals system for the online marketplace is not working. In recent weeks, legal advocates have been pressing administration officials, pointing out that rules for the online marketplace, created by the 2010 Affordable Care Act, guarantee due-process rights to timely hearings for Americans who think they have been improperly denied insurance or subsidies.

But at the moment, “there is no indication that infrastructure… necessary for conducting informal reviews and fair hearings has even been created, let alone become operational,” attorneys at the National Health Law Program said in a late-December letter to leaders of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the agency that oversees HealthCare.gov.

Sources also told the Washington Post that fixing this issue “is not among the top priorities” within the administration.

And that’s just the website.