Healthcare.gov notes reveal corrupted data, corrupt navigators

Another 175 pages of October meeting notes from inside the HealthCare.gov “War Room” meetings at the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance (CCIIO), part of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) tasked with implementing ObamaCare, were released on Tuesday. The meetings were comprised of Obama administration officials and contractors discussing the standing issues and problems with HealthCare.gov and represent an unvarnished record of problems and ongoing efforts to address them.

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., released the notes as part of an effort to provide Americans with facts about HealthCare.gov that the Administration has declined to provide.

New information included in the War Room meeting notes:

Navigator fraud: “The first case of Navigator fraud (not a Navigator, just fraud) came today out of OH,” the notes state on October 1st (p. 8). Later, the notes state, “Kansas working with Navigators on fraud allegation.” (p. 76)

State “metrics” available: The notes indicate that officials are encouraging states to only release statistics on a monthly basis as CMS does, but notes, “Some are doing weekly right now.” The notes confirm that CMS has both official and unofficial numbers from states. (p.75)

Limited information, learning from the news: The notes cite a Bloomberg news article stating that health insurance companies are receiving corrupted data from the exchange. The notes indicate this led to a discussion about possible discrepancies in the system and the notes state, “[t]here is no cumulative insight on this topic because we only have daily reports.” (p.75)

Flawed applications due to “event skip:” “What is an ‘event?’ An application is comprised of a series of events. You have an event for citizenship, income, etc. and those events move you through the eligibility logic …. What kinds of events are being skipped? We have seen applications with residency event skip, eligibility event skip, both, and other combinations. The fix will likely be resetting these applicants’ applications and having OC ask them to sign-up again …. It is affecting 30% of N? What is N? 70,000, so it impacts about 22,000 people.” (p. 79)

Wrong codes causing issues. On October 18th the notes reference: “Newly reported transaction issues have surfaced, including:

“Marital status codes- from their perspective, it was new, but we had already identified this. Transactions are going over (husband and wife) both are going over with unmarried as the code, causing issues for issuers.

“Missing county codes from 834s- it is occurring from the issuer perspective when the zip code spans more than one county. This issue is a reoccurring issue that we saw in Plan Preview; thought it was fixed, but may still be happening.

“Improper relationship codes showing up on 834s” (p. 132).

The “War Room” notes released run from October 1, 2013 to October 29, 2013.