Glitch in Connecticut exchange resulted in thousands of problems

Access Health CT is reaching out to 5,784 customers who were either inaccurately enrolled in Medicaid, or who received inaccurate bills because their insurers received incorrect information from the exchange, officials say. Meanwhile, developments related to Minnesota's and Colorado's exchanges are also covered.

The CT Mirror: Access Health CT Finds Glitch Behind Cancellations
When officials at Connecticut's health insurance exchange learned about customers having problems with their coverage in May, they thought they were isolated cases. When GOP legislators raised concerns last month about constituents having their policies canceled, exchange officials maintained the problem was not with their system. But after examining the problems, exchange officials and the vendor that developed the system discovered a programming flaw behind coverage problems affecting thousands of people (Becker, 7/11).

Minnesota Public Radio: Does Minnesota Really Need Still-Broken MNsure Site?
Consumers howled in anger and frustration last fall and winter because the MNsure website could not reliably process their health insurance applications. And a recent evaluation by Deloitte Consulting found the site's software still can't reliably perform nearly two thirds of all necessary functions. And yet, despite the seriously hobbled website, various workarounds, including lots of manually filled out paper applications, allowed a quarter of a million people to enroll in a health plan and reduce the number of Minnesotans who have no coverage by 41 percent (Stawicki, 7/13).

Denver Post: Colorado Health Exchange Short On Information About Enrollees
Colorado's health care exchange plans to spend more than $4 million this fiscal year on branding and to attract Latinos, young people and other groups to sign up for health insurance. But the exchange doesn't know the ethnic breakdown of the nearly 135,000 people who already signed up for insurance. And Connect for Health Colorado is planning to spend nearly $14 million this year toward operating a customer-service call center, but it cannot tell board members how much of phone operators' time various calls are taking up. Three months after open enrollment ended, exchange staff members still haven't done basic analysis that one board member says makes it impossible to budget and plan for the future (Kane, 7/14).