Causing web traffic gridlock and running into software dead-ends, millions of New Yorkers visited and more than 40,000 signed up for health insurance in the first week of business at the state”™s online health benefits marketplace.
“It has been an incredible ride these last eight days,” John Ravitz, executive vice president of The Business Council of Westchester, told a breakfast audience Thursday at a Business Council forum on navigating the Affordable Care Act. A former state assemblyman with long experience navigating government channels in Albany, Ravitz has led the county business group”™s efforts to educate and assist small businesses at the start of the state health exchange that launched Oct. 1.
“This is a huge, huge new infrastructure,” he said. “I have never seen New York state government have to put together a program of this magnitude so quickly.”
Kelly Smith, director of the state”™s Small Business Marketplace, which offers health insurance plans to businesses with 50 or fewer employees, said more than 40,000 individuals and a little more than 200 small businesses had registered on the exchange as of Thursday. More than 5,000 brokers have completed the certification required to do business on the New York State of Health website, she said.
When fully implemented by the end of 2016, about 615,000 individuals and 450,000 employees at about 100,000 small businesses are expected to be insured through the online exchange, she said.
Smith said state officials had projected about 3,000 visitor hits on the New York State of Health website on the first day of operation. Instead, “We were getting 3,000 hits per second.”
The unexpectedly heavy web traffic that locked up both the federal and several of the 14 state exchanges in the first week of business was not caused by cyber attacks, said both Smith and Shannon Pettypiece, a health care reporter at Bloomberg L.P.
Pettypiece, keynote speaker at the Business Council forum, said some opening-day observers speculated that Tea Party opponents of Obamacare or cyber hackers had launched a “denial of service” attack on state and federal sites, flooding them with artificial traffic. However, “Nobody could really find any evidence of that,” she said.
More than just checking out the new government sites,” “People are definitely signing up,” Pettypiece said, noting the 40,000 New Yorkers who registered and 28,000 registrants in California, whose exchange site had 16,000 hits per second on opening day. However, “It”™s really hard to assess whether we”™re off to a good start because there”™s really nothing to compare it to,” she said.
Though most enrollees to date are in their 50s and 60s, “I don”™t get the sense that it”™s just really sick people who are signing up.” Most of the newly insured don”™t appear to have major chronic illnesses, Pettypiece said.
The health care journalist noted that when Massachusetts launched its health insurance exchange seven years ago, people on average visited the site 18 times before making a health plan purchase.
“It”™s a big decision. It”™s sort of like shopping for a car,” she said.
Pettypiece suggested another health care crisis looms as uninsured Americans obtain health insurance coverage mandated by the Affordable Care Act. In New York alone, 1.1 million persons are expected to be insured through the state exchange.
“Maybe people will be able to get access to insurance, but will they be able to get access to a doctor? Good quality care could be hard to get,” said Pettypiece. “I think that”™s still a big unanswered question that needs to be addressed.”
