Thousands of Vermont Health Connect customers who signed up to pay health care premiums online recently received email notices directing them to pay through a website that is offline.
Vermont took down its health exchange Web portal Sept. 14 to address the federal government’s concerns about security and to make improvements to its user interface.
But the state and its contractors apparently forgot during the intervening three weeks to cancel an automated email blast that directed roughly 6,500 people who signed up to make payments online. Those people, about 20 percent of the website’s commercial customers, were directed to visit vermonthealthconnect.gov to view their premium invoice.
All customers will receive a paper invoice in the mail, said Lawrence Miller, chief of Health Care Reform, and can make their payment by mail or by calling 855-377-7979 to reach the toll-free payment line.
Miller said canceling the automated email notices was something the state intended to do but it never happened. He acknowledged that even small blunders can undermine the public’s faith in a system that has had serious problems since its launch a year ago.
“It’s extremely frustrating to have something so simple that should be within our control cause additional confusion for people,” Miller said.
An advisory on the site’s landing page originally just directed users to call the call center, but has since been updated to say: “We apologize for the inconvenience but we are asking all customers to pay by mail or phone during this time.”
The email notices went out Monday. Vermont Health Connect recently changed the due date for premium payments from the first of the month to the 25th.
That decision was made because customers that sent payments to Vermont Health Connect on or close to the end of the month were receiving late-payment notices from their insurance companies.
There’s no penalty for paying after the 25th as long as payments are received by the end of the month, Miller said, but the earlier due date just allows additional time to help people avoid receiving late-payment notices from the insurance companies.
Vermont hopes to bring the Web portal back online and reconnect to the federal data hub before open enrollment in November, state officials have said.
However, there are contingencies in place to do a paper enrollment in November should the site not be back online.
