So he called a news briefing Tuesday because he finally had good news. The backlog of cases of Vermonters trying to make changes to their insurance information had been whittled from 10,200 at the end of May to less than 4,500, he said.
And he predicted that the next improvement — automated policy renewal — will be delivered in time for customers to use it to sign up for 2016 insurance coverage beginning November 1.
“I am committed to making Vermont Health Connect work,” Shumlin said. Still, his administration has a contingency plan in case the new enrollment technology isn’t ready by October 1, the state’s deadline. In a backup plan delivered to legislators earlier this month, the administration said it would hire 200 temporary workers at a cost of $3.5 million to manually process renewals.
Lawrence Miller, Shumlin’s health reform chief, said the contingency plan represented “what a worst-case scenario would look like.” Based on reports from Optum, the state’s contractor, he said, “This does not feel like something we are going to need to do.”
Neither the governor nor Miller provided a date by which they would decide if they had to go with the backup plan. Shumlin said he is briefed every morning about the work.
The progress in reducing the backlog has been made possible by the successful deployment in late May of an automated “change of circumstance” function for staff. This new capability means that at least half of all new requests for changes can be handled while the customer is on the phone, Shumlin said.
“I’m optimistic about having the backlog cleared up on October 1 when we need it cleared up,” Shumlin said.
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Shummy is really hedging his bets. He is making ‘predictions’ and is ‘optimistic’. Far cries from the ‘nothing burger’.
So they think being able to handle account change requests in real time is a big deal. Umm, OK. (Why wouldn’t the core system be built to handle this basic function? Sorry, I digress…)
We all still get paper bills. Email distribution of a simple bill doesn’t work, I guess. And when you do get your bill, it cannot be paid via a recurring payment capability, plus you cannot store payment info. (Come to think of it, this may be a good thing!)
I’ve said it before, this $200 million system is a shit show. There should be indictments issued, starting at the top.
The first contractor messed up big time, it sounds like Optum actually knows what they’re doing.
Our family has been through hell with VT Health Connect. They have cancelled us twice due to their mismanagement. Last month, it took about 15 phone calls to get back our insurance. What a mess. They still have no record of one of our premiums even though our bank shows us that they have cashed our check. Everyone I called referred me to someone else. No one called back as they said that they would. I called Shumlin’s office as well. Huge huge disconnect between VT Health Connect and MVP. They lost 2 checks in the fall as well, even though it showed they were received on the VT Health website. OMG – a huge clusterf—!!!! I have had many sleepless nights over this mess. I could not get life sustaining prescriptions. GET IT TOGETHER VT HEALTH CONNECT!!!!!