With Maryland Health Connection's website still dysfunctional, the exchange's board is turning to traditional and online brokers to salvage the public marketplace program.
The associations will fund and operate a hotline available on the Maryland Health Connection website for consumers to call and connect with brokers in their area.
The exchange's board also approved a plan to start working with a "web-based entity" to enroll subsidy-eligible consumers after a request for proposals is issued.
In the running for that is eHealthInsurance, the online private exchange that has spent the past year urging the Obama Administration and state governments to use the Affordable Care Act's web-based entity (WBE) option to let it enroll consumers eligible for subsidies at no taxpayer cost.
Under the pilot program that the Maryland Health Benefit Exchange Board approved, Marylanders will have the option to find and selected qualified health plans with subsidies through an online private exchange.
The new alternative system probably won't function as eHealth has envisioned, at least initially, with smooth connections between the private and public exchanges. Maryland Health Connection "cannot integrate its website with a WBE at this time, given current IT challenges," the board wrote in its presentation.
Instead, the board proposed, consumers will fill out the application on the private exchange's website, receive their advanced premium tax credit calculation, make a preliminary plan choice and then eHealth (or other web-based entities) will send the information to Maryland Health Benefit Exchange staff, who will then enter the data for enrollment.
In Maryland, and possibly elsewhere, the WBE process may work best for "for single individuals rather than households" that need to be verified, the Maryland Health Benefit Exchange board said in its presentation.
Whether or not eHealth ends up as a the private HIX for Maryland's pilot, the company "is working with the federal government to set up similar capabilities," as CEO Gary Lauer said in a recent media release.
Either way, the exchange's leaders and the states lawmakers are desperate to alleviate consumer complaints about an enrollment process that seems to be working much of the time but is still drawn-out, inconsistent and reliant on support from call center staff.
Maryland Health Connection has seen enrollments increase in the last month, tripling since the end of December to more than 25,000 qualified health plans selected.
But "multiple defects remain outstanding," exchange staff told the board in an IT management update. "An assessment of the current system has identified a number of architectural and infrastructure issues that the team is working with Noridian to correct," the staff said, referring to the lead contractor, Noridian Healthcare Solutions, a division of Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Dakota.
Those issues also prompted the exchange board to decide to delay the launch of its small business exchange website, from October 2014 to January 2015, although small group tax credits will still be available on schedule.