Lawmakers grilled MNsure and state officials Tuesday about enrollment and call center problems that occurred in December as thousands of Minnesotans tried to renew or establish health insurance coverage for 2016.
At the time, the Star Tribune reported that 64,000 people in the state's public health insurance programs were being dropped from coverage for failing to supply requested information.
On New Year's Eve, the state decided to extend coverage into January because of problems with the renewal process. On Tuesday, Human Services Commissioner Emily Johnson Piper provided lawmakers with more detail, saying the state had failed to give enrollees a required 10-day notice of the cutoffs.
On the MNsure side, wait times at the health insurance exchange's call center on Dec. 28 averaged an hour, due in part to an ice storm in Illinois that cut staffing by an outside vendor. MNsure Chief Executive Allison O'Toole told legislators that the vendor is compensating with extra call center resources at other times during the exchange's current open enrollment period, but the answer didn't satisfy Sen. Michelle Benson, R-Ham Lake.
"Frankly, until we get some money back, they'll just look at us as patsies," Benson said during a meeting of the MNsure Legislative Oversight Committee near the Capitol in St. Paul.
Minnesota launched the MNsure exchange in 2013 to implement the federal Affordable Care Act, which requires almost all Americans to have health insurance or pay a tax penalty.
People who buy individual policies have a chance at federal tax credits if they purchase through MNsure. The state also uses the exchange's IT system for handling enrollment and determining eligibility for the Medical Assistance and MinnesotaCare programs.
Crunch time
The week between Christmas and New Year's was a crunch time for MNsure. People buying private coverage through the exchange had until Dec. 28 to purchase plans that would take effect on Jan. 1.
