Press Release

23,792 immediately enrolled in MassHealth; 28,175 found eligible for Connector-sponsored health plans, with 14,101 selecting a plan

BOSTON – Monday, November 24, 2014 – In the first seven days of Open Enrollment 2015, the new Massachusetts Health Insurance Exchange (“MA HIX”) website successfully determined 51,967 individuals eligible for Affordable Care Act (ACA) health insurance.  Of those, 23,792 were immediately enrolled in MassHealth coverage.

The remaining 28,175 were found eligible for Health Connector-sponsored plans. Just over half – 14,101 – have already shopped and selected their health plans while 753 have finished the enrollment process by paying their first bill, five weeks in advance of the Dec. 23 deadline to take action for Jan. 1, 2015 coverage.

MAhealthconnector.org attracted a total of 334,108 unique visitors in its first full week of operations, serving a high of 1,292 concurrent users with a page response time of 382 milliseconds. An average of 581 front line staff were available to assist consumers with questions about their applications across state and vendor call centers and application processing units.

“By any measurement, the first full week of Open Enrollment in Massachusetts was a great success,” said Maydad Cohen, the Governor’s Special Assistant for Project Delivery. “People came to one front door and did what they weren’t able to do last year: be determined eligible for subsidized or unsubsidized coverage and then shop, select, pay for and enroll in a plan. The proof that the site works lies in the numbers but that does not mean we can rest. We are proud of our first week but there are 12 more to go and a lot of people who need access to the health and economic security that health insurance assures.”

Cohen made his remarks while releasing the MA HIX project’s first weekly dashboard measuring project performance. The dashboards – which capture daily statistics Tuesday-Friday and weekly data every Monday – have made Massachusetts stand out among other state-based Marketplaces and the federal Exchange for consistent and transparent Open Enrollment reporting.

“We are sharing data in real-time in order to understand what’s working well and what we can do better,” said Cohen. “At first glance, today’s weekly dashboard shows we are making significant inroads with temporary MassHealth members. They are responding to our call-to-action to reapply. It appears right now that we need to do more to bring Commonwealth Care members to the website so that if they need coverage in 2015, they get it. We also have some work to do to better understand what these numbers say about the Commonwealth’s uninsured population and the folks who were in temporary coverage but will be in unsubsidized plans next year. We will be taking a closer look at these items and reporting on our analysis in the coming weeks.”

MAhealthconnector.org will be closed to the public from 10 p.m. tonight to 2 a.m. tomorrow for scheduled maintenance and minor system enhancements. The improvements include more streamlined, consumer-friendly pages on immigration; quicker, easier access to the regional list of enrollment assisters; and functionality for customer service agents who help applicants create accounts over the phone to email consumers their account information so that the applicant can complete the application process online. These minor changes are part of ongoing “clean-up” work and respond directly to feedback received from users during the first week of operations. More extensive system builds are scheduled for next month when back office functionality will allow consumers to make life event changes to their accounts.

The Massachusetts Operations Command Center, the project’s technical and operational epicenter, opened for its tenth day at 7 a.m. Monday morning. The center, which houses over 100 IT, policy and business operations officials from the state, Optum, hCentive, Dell and Maximus, is responsible for providing constant systems monitoring, identifying issues that will impact consumers and the marketplace and developing and implementing solutions. Today, the Commonwealth and its vendors will have over 650 customer service agents on the phones and processing applications.

During Open Enrollment 2015, members currently enrolled in temporary MassHealth, Commonwealth Care and Qualified Health Plan programs must submit a new application in order to obtain health insurance through the Commonwealth for calendar year 2015. They also must take action by a certain date in order to ensure care continuity and prevent gaps in coverage. The table below outlines who needs to act by when.

Contact:
Kim Haberlin – 617-470-9686
Jason Lefferts – 617-869-4894
Claire Cooper – 617-921-6870

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