[caption id=”attachment_107970″ align=”aligncenter” width=”4962″] (AP Photo/Don Ryan)
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The Obamacare exchanges opened over the weekend with about 100,000 new consumers submitting applications.
Unlike the previous year, which saw 2.5 million visitors and only six completed applications, the opening went fairly smoothly everywhere except Washington state.
The Washington state Obamacare exchange went offline just hours after the start of the 2015 open enrollment period. The state’s website was incorrectly calculating the amount of advanced premium tax credits, the Daily Caller reported, a problem the state has struggled with since last year’s enrollment period.
“In preparation for year two, the Exchange had in place quality control review to capture any irregularities that might appear in applications during the first few hours of open enrollment,” the exchange said in a statement. “This review process discovered that the state’s Eligibility System and Washington Healthplanfinder were providing 2015 tax credit amounts that were inaccurate, sometimes by as little as a few dollars.”
Beyond that the Healthcare.gov site saw problems with some searches for insurance policy details leading to error messages and some consumers receiving a notice that the annual enrollment period was closed, meaning that not all pages on the website had been updated. Politico also reported that some users had trouble logging into their accounts.
Health and Human Services officials attributed the improved 2015 rollout to its “window shopping” feature. This allowed 1.2 million people to look at possible coverage options without overloading the system when the actual enrollment started.
But despite being technically better this year — a low threshold to beat — Obamacare’s real challenge in its second year will be getting the people that signed up in the past to stay on board while also attracting new customers.
About 7.1 million people signed up last year and if they don’t cancel or sign up for a different plan by Dec. 15, the site will automatically re-enroll them.
Bringing new people on — a necessity for keeping the program operational — will be harder this time around. People eager to get coverage already did it and most of the currently uninsured remain uninformed about the law. About 90 percent didn’t know open enrollment began this month, according to a recent Kaiser Family Foundation survey.
A separate Gallup poll found that 46 percent of uninsured respondents were “not familiar at all” and 19 percent were “not too familiar” with the Healthcare.gov exchange to obtain health insurance. About 30 percent of poll respondents said they did not know about the law’s individual mandate and the fine that comes with not having insurance.
