As Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew made yet another announcement of the debt ceiling deadline at the Bipartisan Policy Center yesterday, we are reminded once again of the government's incompetence. The government's closure and the rollout of healthcare.gov are two of the most recent examples of that ineptitude. While the government is now open, Obama Care and the infrastructure designed to facilitate the signup process is still facing problems.
Call centers in California and Colorado as well as many other states have had, and still continue to this day experience issues in trying to manage call volumes. The Maryland health exchange call center has been struggling to cope with the increasing number of consumers looking to get affordable insurance. Just like the fiasco surrounding the healthcare.gov rollout, the state also faced challenges regarding its own website, additionally the director of the insurance exchange, Rebecca Pearce, resigned after ongoing technical problems kept on persisting. After two years and $107 million to build the exchange, the system is still not functioning at optimal levels.
The problem with the call center is the increased number of callers in the past several months. With an increase of 204 percent from November to December, the wait times have increased to more than tenfold, while the number of abandoned calls is all the way up to 48 percent.
In January, the number of calls reached more than 60,000, which led the call center to add an additional 97 call representatives by the end of the month in order to deal with the volume. Some of the workload was also transferred to Optum/QSSI, the company that was contracted to fix the website. The increase in staff will bring the total number of call representatives to 363, which will reduce the wait time for Marylanders looking to find affordable insurance.
In related news, Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley on Jan. 30 signed into law a measure that would allow individuals that were affected by many of the glitches of the state's website retroactive to Jan. 1. With this law anyone that couldn't signup will be able to avoid any deadline penalties. The state put the number of people affected by the website's malfunction between several hundred to 5,000 people. The final deadline to enroll in the healthcare exchange is March 31.
Edited by
Cassandra Tucker
