I live tweeted last year’s Covered California failures. Mostly because I had no other choice – my aunt was dying of cancer right as the nation’s healthcare system was being “fundamentally transformed.” I needed to know how to get her a plan if it came to that.
Thankfully it didn’t. But, this year everyone said things will be all better.
Are they? Not really. Today I got yet another new error. My open enrollment has been a mess, as I feared and expected. I’m being booted off my plan, and can’t sign up for a new one because of system errors.
Below is the latest. I’ll be calling on Monday, to be stuck in a queue of “whoopsie” applications. I anticipate that I will probably have to buy an off-exchange plan until Covered California can get to my problem/case/appeal/fail/whatever.
But to say it’s fixed and working fine, is simply incorrect.
Someone tweeted back to me that Covered California was open today… so I called in.
Hold times were very short (though it took minutes to scroll through the myriad of IVR options to get a live person).
They first apologized and owned the issue (glitches aside): Covered California’s server had mis-calculated my income. This is happening a lot right now, apparently, to people who are paid quarterly/annually/variably.
They said they would fix it. Twelve minutes into the hold, my call was dropped on their end. Ugh. Dead end. But, I decided to check – sure enough, the site updated and offered to let me continue to selecting a plan. Yahoo, right?
Wrong. Immediately after selecting that option, the site kicked me out with another BSOD-grade error code. Progress, yes. But broken still, also yes.
Today I successfully re-enrolled to Covered California. The process entailed withdrawing and then restarting my application from scratch after Covered California manually cleared an errant hold on their end.
Would an ordinary person think to do that? Probably not, at least, not without more phone calls to Covered California.
If you are having system errors – try withdrawing your application and starting from scratch. If that fails, call Covered California customer service. Then, after they clear out whatever is blocking on their end, withdraw and start from scratch again.