That means more than half of the roughly 33,000 individuals who use Vermont Health Connect to buy health insurance have been re-enrolled. During 2014’s open enrollment period, it took Vermont at least two months to make the same progress, officials said.
The difference in 2015 is that Vermont’s historically dysfunctional health exchange, which the state has used since 2013 to comply with the federal Affordable Care Act, is now using an automated process to enroll Vermonters in new health insurance programs.
“We know there’s more work ahead, but the size of the diminishing press corps at a Vermont Health Connect press conference suggests that the worst of the bad news is behind us,” Shumlin said.
“I think Vermont is going to be well-served by the Affordable Care Act, and I think Vermonters are going to be served by one of the best functioning websites in the country when we are finished,” he said.
Audio of Tuesday’s news conference.
The administration has two major parts of the exchange left on its plate: It must finish transferring about 60,000 people on an income-based Medicaid program over to the exchange in the next year, and it must satisfy the federal government’s requirement that small businesses be able to shop on the exchange.
The Shumlin administration doesn’t want to build a Small Business Health Options Program, or SHOP, website. Instead, state officials want the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services to approve a waiver that would allow small business customers to continue to enroll directly with the insurers, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Vermont and MVP Healthcare.
Small business customers have been doing that since 2013 because of the troubled website, but the Affordable Care Act mandates that Vermont set up the SHOP portal for small businesses. The federal government would pay for the system, but the Shumlin administration says it doesn’t want to spend the money.
“The carriers are offering full plan choice on their websites, so the difference between the situation that we’ve got now and what SHOP would provide is that instead of an employee being able to see all the plans on one browser, they have to have two tabs open — one for Blue Cross Blue Shield and one for MVP,” said Lawrence Miller, the administration’s chief of health care reform.
Shumlin said the administration is not building the potential costs of SHOP into the fiscal year 2017 budget, which the administration is writing right now. He also doesn’t plan to break the law and tell the federal government flat-out that Vermont doesn’t plan to build SHOP.
At a Health Reform Oversight Committee hearing on Friday, Sen. Tim Ashe, D/P-Chittenden, suggested that Vermont simply say it won’t comply: “We’re planning on breaking other federal laws. Why don’t we break this one?”
Hawaii is the other state seeking to get federal permission not to build SHOP, Shumlin said. If Vermont ends up being required to build the small business exchange, Vermont could coordinate with other states, he said.
