Connecticut Insurance Exchange Outage Due to Healthcare.gov Failure

Connecticut Insurance Exchange Outage Due to Healthcare.gov Failure

A spokeswoman for Connecticut’s health insurance exchange said that a failure in the federal Healthcare.gov website has held up determinations on Medicaid enrollment and tax credit subsidies on her state’s exchange.

According to a report in the New Haven Register on Sunday, Kathleen Tallarita, spokeswoman for Access Healthy CT which runs Connecticut’s state insurance exchange, said the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) notified her office in the early afternoon of the service outage on the Federal Data Services Hub.

The federal hub verifies a customer’s identity and approves Medicaid enrollment and tax credits.

Tallarita said that to the best of her knowledge this is the first time that access to the federal hub has been an issue for Connecticut, which runs its own health insurance exchange.

According to Tallarita, Terremark, the company that operates the data center that hosts the Healthcare.gov website, “experienced a failure in a networking component, and planned maintenance to replace it brought down network connectivity to the data center.”

She added, “Our understanding is that this failure is likely impacting several other sites, in addition to Healthcare.gov and the Data Services Hub.”

In the meantime, Tallarita said Connecticut customers can continue to create an account to sign up for an insurance policy and to shop anonymously for pricing comparisons. Applications, however, will not be approved until the federal hub is back online.

To date, a total of 1,950 Connecticut residents had enrolled in Medicaid as of October 15, while 1,897 had enrolled in private plans, according to Access Healthy CT. The majority of enrollees were in the age 55-64 range, followed by the 45-54 age group.

COMMENTS

Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.