Direct Enrollment Through Insurer Private Exchanges - The Solution to Obamacare Hurdles

In the federal marketplace fiasco, one thing has come out clear - the concept of exchanges, especially private exchanges, will work well. The fact draws from the traffic statistics available for the first few days of the healthcare.gov launch. These impressive numbers underscore the American interest in shopping for health insurance from an online marketplace. However, with an ill performing exchange, all the hope and interest has started to dwindle. In this scenario, the president has a brilliant option - provide direct enrollment capability to the private exchange platform of insurers and health payers.

The concept of direct enrollment is not new, and the Obama administration had already accounted for this functionality to be included in the marketplaces. According to the rule passed by CMS in March 2012, the applicants availing the direct enrollment feature would be able to go directly from the insurer's site to the federal marketplace to complete the application process. The only overhead in this process is that of sending information from the private health exchange to the data hub that stores the information and checks for subsidy eligibility. On the bright side, the move would allow millions of Americans a chance to apply for subsidies up to $5,000 right through the private insurance exchange website.

However, even with all those benefits staring them in the face, insurers have not been able to utilize this opportunity due to a bad performing health insurance marketplace. The subsidy verification process, just like the whole healthcare.gov website, is also suffering from severe bugs and technical issues, and has not been able to provide the functionality to private players. Health payers, such as Aetna, Humana, Wellpoint, Cigna and Blue Cross Blue Shield plans have not been able to use their private exchange for converting the applicants, and are sincerely hoping that the government aims to fix the subsidy module on priority.

From a consumer perspective, there is a lack of interest from health payers and not many efforts to increase enrollment numbers. From a business perspective, that is actually expected as without a working direct enrollment feature, these payers cannot utilize their private health insurance exchange for selling insurance.

Naturally, with all this going on, the direct enrollment feature has become a high priority task for the Obama administration. The administration believes that through their efforts, they will be able to resolve the direct enrollment process fairly quickly, giving insurers a chance to contribute to the pivotal goal of covering Americans through their private exchanges.

Naturally, as the December 1 deadline comes closer, it will become increasingly difficult for the government to fix all the errors and make healthcare.gov as smooth as possible. In such a scenario, it becomes even more imperative for the government to fix the direct enrollment procedure so that consumers and health payers can at least make use of private exchange for getting enrolled.

Author is a well known authority on private exchange in the US. She is currently looking to expand her expertise in Private health exchange available.