Site works on orphaned data

WASHINGTON - It is possible there were problems with the enrollment records for a quarter of all the people who signed up for health insurance through the federal marketplace in October and November, the Obama administration said Friday, raising questions about whether consumers will get coverage in time to pay for their medical care next month.

Even now, the administration said, it may be sending incomplete or erroneous information to insurers on 1 of every 10 people who try to enroll.

Julie Bataille, a spokesman at the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said the agency was working with insurers to correct the errors and resolve discrepancies in records kept by the government and by insurers.

In some cases, the government did not notify insurers of people who enrolled online at healthcare.gov. The government refers to these people as “CMS orphans” because the consumers successfully completed the application process and selected health plans, but the government did not send the information to the insurers.

An administration official said the government would do everything possible to “rescue the orphans.”

In other cases, Bataille said, the government sent more than one enrollment notice for the same person to an insurer. And in some instances, she said, the information sent was incorrect. A child may have been listed as a parent, a name may have been misspelled or an address may be wrong.

Moreover, officials said, some people who signed up for a health plan are listed in insurance company records but not in the government’s records. In those cases, consumers may have canceled enrollment in a health plan, but the government failed toinform the insurer.

The errors and omissions resulted from technical problems that hindered the website in its first weeks, Bataille said.

With hundreds of hardware upgrades and software changes, Bataille said, the site now works well for the vast majority of consumers who use it. However, insurers say they are still seeing problems in “back-end systems,” which are supposed to deliver consumer information to insurers.

Meanwhile, internal emails released by a congressional committee investigating the rollout of the Affordable Care Act show that the decision to delay the health exchange for small businesses was withheld from the public for at least six weeks.

CGI Group Inc., responsible for getting the insurance shopping site for small businesses open Oct. 1, told the Obama administration in August the marketplace wouldn’t be completely ready until at least Nov. 15, according to documents released Friday by Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

The administration was still saying publicly as late as Sept. 26 that the Small Business Health Options Program was on schedule. A news release that day by the Department of Health and Human Services said the SHOP exchange would open Oct. 1.

“We see more and more evidence that the administration was fully aware its signature health-care law was not ready for prime time,” Rep. Fred Upton, the committee chairman and a Michigan Republican, said in a statement.

CGI workers on Aug. 13 told Henry Chao, the deputychief information officer for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services responsible for construction of the exchanges, that the small-business site wouldn’t be ready by Oct. 1 and offered an extended timetable to get the exchange running by Nov. 15, according to the emails.

“Can we sign this with blood?” Chao said. Martin Rich, a CGI executive, agreed to the delayed dates in a follow-up email.

The administration later delayed the exchange again, saying Nov. 27 that small businesses won’t be able to use the federal government’s website to buy health insurance until November 2014 in most states, and would instead have to enroll in plans through brokers or directly with insurers.

Patti Unruh, a Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services spokesman, disagreed with the Republican characterization, saying the emails reflected “one piece of many conversations” about the progress of the small-business exchange.

“The final decision to delay SHOP enrollment functions was not made until mid-September, and CMS announced the delay once we had complete information about what functionality would be available for small business owners on Oct. 1,” she said in an email.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is scheduled to testify before a panel of Upton’s committee Wednesday.

Information for this article was contributed by Robert Pear of The New York Times and by Drew Armstrong of Bloomberg News.