So we all appreciate the Affordable Care Act. I certainly do. I’ve been able to stay on my parents’ plan up until this year, and the insurance rates actually seem to be affordable. Certainly, I’d struggle a lot more without it.
Now it’s time for me. I’ll be 26 in February. I need to go on the exchange. Covered California, here I come!
I search around, consider my options, conclude that what I most likely need is HealthNet Silver87 Community Care. Great, let’s apply and get this going, I should be a few clicks away, and I’ll be done!
(All times Pacific in this diary.)
8PM (Yesterday): Start the application process. Create account… password rules don’t allow for any of my existing passwords, fine, make a completely new one, write it down somewhere because it’s impossible to remember on my own. Let’s get into it. Personal information… IDENTITY CONFIRMATION FAILED.
Seriously?
And there doesn’t seem to be a way to do this online. It offers an “online upload” (of a driver’s license picture or something) but insists you have to call. Okay, fine, I call… oh, great, only open from 8 to 8, so I just missed the calling window. Well, fine, my substitute assignment starts late enough tomorrow I don’t need to leave until 9:30, so I can just call at 8, we’ll get this settled, no problems, right?
8AM: I make the call. 5 minutes of hold. Get on. How can I help you? I explain the verification issue. Another 10 minutes of hold. Lady explains that this is a rare problem and that she’s going to try to just create a new account. I ponder if this is because of the credit freezes I (and millions) have put on due to the Equifax data breach, she denies this possibility, saying it would be happening a lot more if that were all there was to it, despite admitting that credit agencies are looked at. The new account (which I never got username/password for anyway) doesn’t seem to work either. I offer to upload the aforementioned driver’s license, which I’d already scanned an image of. She tells me that a link can be provide in online “live chat”. I thank her, wish her a good day, and hang up.
8:30AM: I go on live chat. I explain the issue. Person says I have to go in person. This feels like this completely defeats the point of an online upload. I sigh, and sign off live chat. I check for locations. There’s one location near me, but it doesn’t open until 9. Given the speed of things so far, even though I’d have half an hour, I simply can’t trust that I’d be done in that time. I can’t miss work. So I’ll go after work. Probably there around 3:15. By the time I get my identity verified, it’ll be about 20 hours since I started this process. IF this works. I’m now scared.
3:10PM: I walk into the door of the insurance agent. Fortunately, the place seems close to empty. This means I get helped very quickly. I explain the process I’d gone through so far. I authorize them as a broker, she copies my driver’s license and gets it uploaded. Everything looks good, and we determine I should be fine to go home and finish it. I do mention the possibility of the verification issues being due to my credit freezes, and she doesn’t dismiss that as an option. But, everything should be fine now since verification has been done in person with a Driver’s License submitted. Huh, only 15 minutes. Guess I could’ve made it in in the morning. Oh well.
4:10PM: I’ve been home for a while now, mostly getting some basic stuff done like making sure the front landscape is watered (and the valve is yet again wasting water – nothing I do seems to keep it fixed, ugh. Water saving systems only work when they work correctly.) I finally have a chance to go back to Covered California. My identity has already been confirmed, this should now be a piece of cake…IDENTITY CONFIRMATION FAILED.
Sigh.
Call the insurance agent back up (that is, at the office I was at an hour ago), she remembers me, offers to just do the whole thing in the office, because it’s working on her end. I agree and go back into the office.
4:20PM: Back at the insurance agent. We go through the process, everything goes smoothly with her signing everything. I already knew what I plan I wanted, so I select it, and it’s confirmed. I’ll be paying just under $100/month for my Silver plan after the tax credit for low income.
4:40PM: I get home, and… yay, it’s still working! I quickly hit “Pay Now” and get my first month’s payment into HealthNet just to make sure it can’t be erased later.
21 hours to complete this process. Granted, sleep, work, etc. involved here. But still, that was made much harder than it needs to be for many reasons.
(5:30PM: I complete this write up and get ready to post it on Daily Kos.)
Despite the phone agent’s confidence that my problems didn’t have anything to do with the credit freezes I placed after the Equifax data breach, I don’t really see how it can be anything else. It’s possible that Covered California is just really bad at this, but we’d be hearing a lot more about it from previous years as well. That being said, because most of us have submitted credit freezes, expect it to happen a lot this year.
I recommend to every Californian newly needing health insurance this year through the exchange, just do the whole thing in person if at all possible, especially if you’ve put credit freezes on (which you should have). You won’t have to go through the headaches I did.
Overall though, especially after yesterday’s hurdle, I expected it to be a lot worse. I expected to be on phones, driving all over the place, all month long. I wasn’t. All things considered, it worked well. They need to stop relying on credit agencies for identity verification. (The courts certainly know I exist, being able to find me to have me report for jury service, as I did on Halloween!)
I hope this account of my experience, the good and the bad side of things, helped people.