Stop sweating the technical problems
By Dina Overland
David Lyons, CEO of CoOportunity Health, admitted the technical issues that beleaguered HealthCare.gov hurt some of its early enrollment numbers. But he explained the insurer didn't take a substantial hit because enrollment has been coming in three waves.
The first wave included motivated consumers who have a real financial or health reason to obtain insurance coverage. "For those folks, price was the important issue," Lyons told FierceHealthPayer. "If the system didn't work perfectly they were ok with giving it a little time, so they came back. So I don't think we lost too much out of that group."
The second group consisted of value shoppers. "They're a little less tolerant of the errors in the system but by the time they arrived, there were fewer errors," Lyons said. Although he doesn't think the technical glitches affected many of those consumers, he recognized "some folks might have taken their early renewal policy because it was a simpler decision for them to make."
The third wave of consumers, the mandated purchasers, has to comply or pay a penalty. They haven't started enrolling in exchange plans yet, but Lyons said he still believes they will sign up--as long as the marketplace and consumer experience continues to improve, both in terms of capacity and its intuitive nature.
The space where CoOportunity Health did lose consumers was from small businesses. "With the SHOP exchange not being available, we did have some people say if it's this hard to find out if I qualify for a tax credit, I'll just come back next year when the SHOP is open," he noted.
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