Dear CAHU Members,
The introduction
of Covered California’s exchange will be a subject of discussion by economists
and social scientists for many years to come. But for most CAHU members it has been
a daily test of tenacity, frustration, and deep concerns about the future of
our profession. Most of us ended 2013 overworked and wrestling with the desire
to provide a professional level of service to our clients against the reality
that solutions have been slow in coming. It is in this charged climate that the
leadership team of CAHU has worked relentlessly to extinguish a backdraft of technical
and policy problems, many of which never made headlines but are nonetheless
critical to our livelihoods. CAHU continues this fight into 2014 and is working
hard to achieve actionable solutions for our members. I believe it is more
important than ever to let you know that CAHU is in your corner and will
continue to be a loud and vigorous voice for health insurance agents across
California. I also believe that it is important to let you know more about the
challenges we tackle and the solutions we work hard to achieve.
Starting today,
Monday, January 13, 2014, and every Monday thereafter through end of my tenure
as president, I will be providing you with an update on our progress on your
behalf through my blog. I hope that you
will choose to Opt-In and receive it.
Here are some of
the top issues we worked on last week.
CAHU leadership
requested and successfully instituted a weekly conference call with the
leadership team at Covered California to voice the concerns of our members. This
will supplement and support the ongoing calls initiated by CAHU and our
advocacy team at California Advocates. Here
is what we discussed:
Individual
Applications
•
CAHU
repeated its request for a special point
of contact dedicated to agents for questions about individual applications. As
a result CAHU has been given a direct interim contact at Covered California.
CAHU will serve as a clearing house for all emailed questions sent to a dedicated email address set up for that purpose. CAHU members should
continue to send questions about individual applications to Comments@CAHU.org. These questions will be read by CAHU,
logged, and forwarded to CAHU’s direct Covered California contact. We will be
in daily communication with our contact and will keep a running list of the
solutions are we seeking for our members. We will keep you updated on our
efforts on your behalf. We hope that by instituting this new service for CAHU members, we will help you to
better serve your clients.
•
CAHU
repeated its request for a permanent agent call line for individual exchange
application. Covered California is working to find the resources to provide this
service and we will advise our members when it is implemented.
•
CAHU
received a large volume of agent complaints regarding applications submitted that
still do not show up in the agent’s site. In some cases it has been found that
agents were trying to access pending applications incorrectly on the agent
portal. At this time, it is expected
that Covered California is current with inputting the initial application
information into the system. Covered California will be updating and re-releasing information
to agents on how to locate pending
applications on their agent portal CAHU needs to hear from agents who still are
not seeing their clients show up on their portal by emailing Comments@CAHU.org.
SHOP
Applications
On SHOP
applications: All bills should be issued
by this past weekend for groups that went in prior to the deadline and were clean. For groups that still have eligibility
information being requested, forms being worked on, that may be later. The bill will be sent in the mail to the
clients. Once the bill is paid, the next day the carrier tape should be sent to
the carriers. The carriers will have
their own process for getting eligibility in order.
Agent
Focus Groups
CAHU is working
with Covered California to set up two agent focus groups (one for Individual
Exchange issues and the other for SHOP). The focus groups are a new and
exclusive avenue for CAHU member agents to directly identify to Covered
California their ongoing challenges, and to provide constructive solutions
directly to the leadership of Covered California when using current Covered
California application and on-line tools.
In
Summary
There are many
more ongoing applications process questions that need to be addressed and it is
clear that CAHU must continue its fight to usher in a member resolution process
that will accelerate our capacity to serve our clients. We are making headway
on this front while knowing fully that there is so much more work to do.
Until next week,
thank you for your continued support and for continuing to advocate on behalf
of your clients.
Sincerely,
Sam