Access Health CT wants to make sure that people who signed up for health care coverage this year get to keep it. Andrea Ravitz, director of Marketing for Access Health CT, says thousands of consumers are at risk of losing their coverage because they haven’t submitted documentation that’s required to activate their health insurance.
Ravitz recently spoke with WSHU’s All Things Considered Host Bill Buchner about the state's healthcare exchange.
Below is a transcript of their conversation.
How many people are at risk of losing their insurance?
So there’s two big buckets. There is approximately 23,000 people around the state that still owe us some type of verification documents. And what this does is basically confirm information about their application that we were not able to confirm. So that’s 23,000 people in that bucket. And then the other bucket is that every year we lose approximately 15 percent of the total population because they forget to pay their first monthly premium to their insurance company.
What type of documentation do consumers need to share with Access Health CT?
There’s various categories. The majority of these 23,000 people owe us income information and the second biggest category is citizenship, or immigration documentation. What happens is when you sign up and if you say that your income is $20,000, and I’m just going to make that as an example, and we try to confirm that with federal agencies and there’s a discrepancy between what the customer said and what’s in that federal agency, we need additional information to verify that. And that’s really to help the consumer to keep their financial help if they have it or just to confirm information in general.
There have been reports that some people are not reporting their immigration status because of the Trump administration’s stand on immigration. Have you noticed a change this year in the number of people sharing their immigration status?
Let’s just remember that only people who have a lawfully present status in the state and in the country are able to get some type of health through Access CT. What we have seen, just in the community when we go and talk to individuals, that there is some fear, especially in those households were there is mixed statuses. It could be that mom and dad don’t have a legal status but their children do have, that they have that fear of even sharing that information, knowing that their children could be eligible for some type of coverage. So I think it’s really important for that population to remember that even if you live in a mixed household, the information that is shared with Access CT we do not share with anybody else. And we want to make sure we insure as many people as possible with that lawfully present status.
What can people do if they lose their coverage?
Only those individuals who are eligible for Medicaid, they can come anytime of the year and sign up. But outside of that if they are not eligible for Medicaid, only those that experienced a life changing event, such as, I’m adopting a child, I’m having a child, I got married, I got divorced, I came to the state from another country or another state, those are the only exceptions that will allow that person to come to the exchange and get coverage. Now there is a specific amount of time, they only have 60 days from the day of that special event to be able to get coverage. This year there was an increase of people signing up during Open Enrollment, even though the enrollment period was shorter than last year.
Why was that?
This year we were really proactive knowing there was so much confusion in the market, knowing that there was a lot of confusion coming from the administration. So we started our campaign from a communications perspective in October. Our Open Enrollment started in November, so we used the entire month of October to kind of set the facts straight. Making sure that people understood that we were still in business, that there was still financial help available and that we were here to help them. We saw a 2.3 increase compared to last year and that equals to 114,000 individuals here in Connecticut that we were able to enroll.
Has the Trump administration’s push to dismantle the Affordable Care Act had an impact on health care coverage in Connecticut?
You would think that this year would have been a good starting point that people think the Affordable Care Act was dead. And what we saw was completely the opposite and Connecticut is not the exception. Nationwide a lot of the exchanges saw an increase in membership. And I think part of this is a combination of the amount of national news that everybody saw this year was comparable to what we saw the very first year the ACA was being implemented. So healthcare in general was top of mind for a lot of individuals. So I think that helped, creating that awareness that people needed to take action.
