Florida Woman Struggles to Unenroll from Obamacare

For one Florida woman enrolling in Obamacare was difficult but not nearly as difficult as unenrolling turned out to be.

Melissa Battles signed up for an Obamacare insurance plan last year. She said enrolling was “very convoluted” and tool a very long time. She says she encountered a “whole other level of red tape” when she tried to get her son, who is autistic, into a “healthy kids” program.

But all of that was nothing compared to what came next. When Battles got a full time job which offered her health insurance she went back to the company she had selected on Healthcare.gov and told them she wanted out of her plan. They told her since she enrolled online she would need to unenroll the same way. But at the time there was no procedure available on the website to allow people to cancel a plan.

“I was blown away that they had not thought forward enough to realize that people are going to disenroll” Battles says. After being shuffled around by phone Battles was eventually told she could unenroll from the plan the following month. Until then she had to pay for two health plans simultaneously.

This is not the first time someone has complained about difficulty unenrolling in a plan selected on Healthcare.gov. Last month, an Orlando man made a similar complaint to another local news station. Andrew Robinson spend “50-60 hours on the phone” trying to cancel a plan he decided was too expensive. He was considering closing his bank account as a way to prevent paying for a policy he no longer wanted.

WFTV News contacted HHS about the story but received no response.