We applied for an insurance policy with CIGNA through Connect For Health Colorado to start January 1, 2014, on the December 23,. 2013 deadline. This was the culmination of an application process that started in October and took months to wend through the Medicaid rejection process that should have been obvious from the outset. Five months later, we still don't have health insurance through Connect For Health.
On January 29, 2014, we finally received an invoice from CIGNA, due in late December for the health insurance that we hadn't received in January. CIGNA also advised us that if we paid it, all of the health insurance payments to health care providers in January using our previous health insurer. And, they couldn't adjust the start date themselves without getting Connect for Health involved again We hadn't cancelled the policy since we needed health care and had received no response from CIGNA. So, we immediately contacted Connect For Health to Change the start date from January 1, 2014 to March 1, 2014.
Today, February 28, 2014, about ten long conversations with Connect for Health later, we were advised that in every single previous communication with them, involving perhaps fifteen to twenty-five hours on the phone and contacts with several supervisors (at call centers in locations apparently located from Arizona to New York) who promised that they had processed the change (including one supervisor whom everyone else after that said had flat out lied to us about resolving our claim), had totally screw up our change and done absolutely nothing to change our CIGNA policy start date. The most recent person we spoke to at Connect for Health promised to call us on Thursday, March 7, 2014 with an update.
Seriously, it should not take ten people and twenty hours and a five weeks to change a start date on a policy. It has been frequently advertised as taking about twenty minutes. This is not rocket science.
But, the staff at Connect for Health Colorado is so utterly incompetent that is appears to be nearly impossible for them to process our quite plain vanilla effort to purchase health insurance through this exchange.
Why did you go thru the exchange?
ReplyDeleteWe just used to check prices and then went straight to the insurance company (in our case, Kaiser).
Because if you don't go through the exchange you can't receive the very substantial Obamacare subsidies on the premiums. It is basically a monopoly on the purchase of Obamacare subsidized health insurance in the state.
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