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MNsure faster, more prepared, CEO says [The Free Press, Mankato, Minn.](Free Press (Mankato, MN) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Nov. 09--NORTH MANKATO -- MNsure CEO Scott Leitz said Saturday that the state health exchange will be "greatly improved" this year, after technical flaws plagued its rollout last fall. Web pages on the exchange, mnsure.org, load about twice as fast as before, he said. There are fewer freezes and crashes. And MNsure now has about 300 call center representatives, after having just 22 last year. "It was a collective ... learning experience for everybody. We tried to learn from that and make the system better," Leitz said, noting that the site itself is now easier to navigate. Leitz was among the state leaders who took questions during a two-and-a-half hour MNsure listening session Saturday at South Central College. The event also featured Department of Human Services Interim Assistant Commissioner Nathan Moracco and Tim Vande Hey and Peter Brickwedde of the state Department of Commerce. MNsure open enrollment runs from Nov. 15 to Feb. 15 for coverage starting in 2015. About 35 people attended the event, which was hosted by State Sen. Kathy Sheran, DFL-Mankato, and State Rep. Clark Johnson, DFL-Mankato. The agency leaders and elected officials answered questions about MNsure's early problems but stressed that the exchange should be a stop for all consumers. Leitz said that MNsure is still a work in progress in many ways, but that its leaders are better equipped to deal with issues than they were a year before. All of the agency employees at the event stressed the benefits of shopping on the exchange for consumers, noting that it's the only place where they can receive tax credits. "That's how consumers are going to be most impactful to the marketplace," Vande Hey said. "We need consumers to be engaged in their purchase of health insurance, to review that very carefully and to be willing to move around." 375,000 enrolled Under the Affordable Care Act, passed in 2010, states were required to set up their own health-insurance exchanges or default onto the federal exchange. Gov. Mark Dayton signed an executive order in November 2011 to create a Minnesota exchange. The state Legislature passed an exchange bill in March 2013. MNsure enrolled about 375,000 people last year despite the technological flaws, including about 65,000 on private plans. About 2,000 people from the Mankato area enrolled in private plans, Leitz said. This year the exchange has seen several big changes, notably the loss of Preferred One, its largest and lowest-cost provider. Sheran said Preferred One picked up a lot of the high-risk people and struggled because of that. She said the insurer would need the high-risk pool to be distributed more fairly throughout the providers before it could return to the exchange. Several audience members voiced concern about how the loss of Preferred One could lead to premium increases. Brickwedde, of the Commerce Department, noted that every individual will have a different set of circumstances that will affect whether their rates increase or decrease. He said Minnesotans have a culture shift to embrace in that they should shop around for insurance to try and find the best plans. Leitz said MNsure would like people enrolled in 2014 to come back through the system and fill out a new application. People whose plans are still available will be auto-enrolled, however, if they don't. Leitz said one challenge for the exchange has been helping people with re-enrollment after special life events, such as births and changes of address. In those cases, people are allowed to enroll in MNsure outside of the open-enrollment period. Leitz said the exchange has gone through about 13,000 of those changes but has 1,700 still to do, a process he said has been a source of frustration. Moracco, of the Department of Human Services, said his hope is for the exchange to be able to process people on both public programs and private plans. Currently a majority of the people enrolled through MNsure are on some sort of public program. Morocco also said the state is letting counties do some of the administrative work in enrolling people, which appears to be a welcome change. Sue Serbus, the adult mental health clinical supervisor for Nicollet County Social Services, said during the event that she wants administrators to allow local workers to continue processing applications, noting the expertise and experience of the employees. In an interview after, she said the mentally ill often have difficulty understanding the system and are computer illiterate. The state could save time by allowing them to come into their local human-services agency to apply for health care, she said, instead of having them go through the state. "It seems to me that we've thrown our public-assistance people into an open market," she said. "And it just doesn't' work for them." Visit mnsure.org for information on the state exchange. ___ (c)2014 The Free Press (Mankato, Minn.) Visit The Free Press (Mankato, Minn.) at www.mankatofreepress.com Distributed by MCT Information Services |