The President of the United States has made an appeal to the insurance industry after the rocky start to Obamacare, looking for advice to minimize disruptions for consumers.
President Barack Obama sought help from 15 insurance executives this week, including those from Humana Inc. and Blue Cross Blue Shield, hoping they can provide the cure to his much-maligned health-care law.
“We all share a similar value, which is we want to make sure that Americans have good, solid coverage that gives them the security they need,” Obama told reporters before the start of the discussion in the Roosevelt Room of the White House.
According to one insurance exec who attended the meeting but only spoke on the condition of anonymity, Obama and the executives discussed efforts to begin direct enrollment in subsidized plans through insurance company websites. Insurers also had concerns about attracting enough young and healthy enrollees, especially after Obama said more Americans could keep their existing plans.
The president, his advisers and the executives also talked about improving the flow of data from the federal online exchange that insurers need to enroll people, the person said. (Continued on Page 2)
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The same group had met with Obama at the White House back in October to discuss the technical problems on the federal health insurance exchange website.
Those technical problems, and the accurate flow of data is crucial to the success of any plan, Jan K. Grude, the CEO of Pacific Blue Cross, told Insurance Business in an earlier interview.
“It is always important to have accurate data,” said Grude. “It’s always important for insurers to have current information on age, marital status, residence and so on. And that typically gets verified externally, by people providing evidence of residency, and that kind of thing.”
Grude points out there are no parallels between Obamacare and the Canadian health care system.
“Would Canadians ever encounter a problem like this? No,” he said. “There’s no parallel between Obamacare and the Canadian health situation. Obamacare is based on a model of coverage tried in Massachusetts that was tested in the last decade (a complete conversion of the Dutch health care system).”
Obama invited the group to meet with him a day after he announced that the administration was altering regulations to permit insurance companies to extend existing policies for an additional year, even though they don’t meet requirements of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
Insurers warned such an action may change the risk pool and lead to higher premiums.
