[T]he Shumlin administration may need to hire up to 200 employees in October and November to help Vermonters manually change their insurance policies for next year.
The announcement is part of the three-part contingency plan that Gov. Peter Shumlin announced in March to fix more than two years of problems surrounding Vermonters’ ability to buy health insurance through Vermont Health Connect.
The administration’s latest backup plan tells the state to be prepared to spend up to $3.5 million more on the health exchange. The number would be in addition to the $862,000 to $2.7 million the Legislature’s Joint Fiscal Office predicts the state must spend to pay for the website’s change-of-circumstance function that went live for state workers to use in June.
The Legislature required the administration to submit a worst-case-scenario plan in this year’s revenue bill, called Act 58. By Oct. 1, the law also requires Optum, the contractor running Vermont Health Connect, to have technology up and running so customers can renew plans without the state needing to hire more employees.
Lawrence Miller, chief of health care reform for the administration, announced the latest contingency step in a memo to the Legislature on Aug. 1. In the memo, Miller detailed how the administration could handle Vermont Health Connect’s open enrollment period from Nov. 1 to Jan. 31.
Miller said Wednesday that the Vermont Health Connect staff is about 100 people. He wants Optum to have a feature on the website working so that Vermonters can enroll in new health insurance plans directly online.
If the self-serve feature isn’t working, Vermonters would need to call the Vermont Health Connect hotline and have a customer service person enter information manually. Since the staff for the website is so small, Miller said the administration would need to contract with other call centers for the 200 temporary employees.
Miller wrote in the Aug. 1 memo that the state “has a contract and delivery schedule” with Optum to have automated features working by open enrollment.
“While there are noted risks, all indications are that the functionality needed for a normal renewal process will be delivered by Oct. 1, 2015, and successfully implemented for the 2016 open enrollment period,” he wrote.
Miller says the $3.5 million maximum is less than businesses would need to spend to hire a broker in the private insurance marketplace to perform the same tasks that the website is expected to perform by Oct. 1.
The number is the equivalent of the state spending $140 per household, per year, to help them find the right health insurance policy. On the private market, a company would pay $240 per household, per year to a private broker coordinating insurance policies, he said.
“It’s not an extravagant sum when you break it down over the number of people, but it’s a lot of money that isn’t budgeted, so we really hope we don’t have to spend it,” Miller said.
“I feel confident that things are moving along well,” he said. “That being said, it is a compressed time frame. It’s bound by a fixed end date, so it remains at risk, and it’s only prudent to make sure that there are contingency plans in place.”
Shumlin has said that if the online renewal function was not available by open enrollment, the state would consider dumping its exchange in favor of the federal Obamacare website healthcare.gov.
The Legislature’s Health Reform Oversight Committee is scheduled to meet Tuesday at 12:30 p.m. at the Statehouse to discuss Vermont Health Connect. The House Health Care Committee will meet Wednesday at 10 a.m. in the Statehouse.
