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State health exchange meets goals

Colorado uninsured numbers unclear

DENVER – Colorado’s health-insurance exchange has enrolled 128,000 people since its launch last fall and is on track to meet its enrollment goals this year, leaders of the exchange told legislators Thursday.

Those numbers include 1,966 people in La Plata County, 547 in Montezuma and 505 in Archuleta.

The Legislature created the health-insurance exchange, Connect for Health Colorado, in 2011 in order to offer one website for individuals and businesses to shop for health insurance from private companies. Under the federal Affordable Care Act, states could either create their own exchanges or use the federal website.

The state and federal websites had troubled launches, but the numbers recovered as the March 31 open-enrollment deadline approached.

“It dramatically skewed younger toward the end of open enrollment,” said Patty Fontneau, CEO of Connect for Health Colorado, at an oversight hearing Thursday.

The numbers appear to make a sizeable dent in the number of uninsured Coloradans, when coupled with the 178,000 low-income Coloradans signed up for government insurance through Medicaid. Last year, between 700,000 and 800,000 Coloradans lacked health insurance.

However, Fontneau could not answer how many of the exchange’s customers were uninsured because federal regulations do not require many customers to say whether they are uninsured. But of the exchange customers who answered the question, about half said they lacked insurance until they got it through Connect for Health Colorado, Fontneau said. The exchange’s leaders are working to get a better answer on how much good they are doing for the uninsured, she said.

Sen. Kevin Lundberg, R-Berthoud, doubted the exchange had done any good because more than 300,000 Coloradans received notices that their insurance plans would be discontinued because they did not meet the minimum standards of the Affordable Care Act.

“We ought to know something about it is working or is it not working,” Lundberg said. “Guesses aren’t good enough.”

However, more than 9 out of 10 people with “canceled” policies were offered different plans by their insurance companies. Fontneau said most of those people stuck with their insurance companies and did not shift to the exchange.

jhanel@durangoherald.com

Sen. Roberts worries about exchange’s plans

DENVER – Insurance brokers in Southwest Colorado are worried the state’s new health-insurance exchange is going to branch out into other lines of business, Sen. Ellen Roberts, R-Durango, said Thursday at an oversight hearing for the exchange.

Connect for Health Colorado CEO Patty Fontneau confirmed that the exchange might one day market life-insurance policies, along with the health-insurance policies it was set up to sell.

But for now, vision coverage is the only new type of policy the exchange’s board is considering, and it won’t branch into new lines of business without working closely with private insurance brokers, Fontneau said.

“We are not in any way, shape or form trying to replace or bypass that group,” she said.

Legislators created the exchange in 2011, and Roberts said she never heard any discussion that it would be anything more than a comparison shopping site for health insurance.

“I think this starts going so far afield from what the exchange was set up to do,” Roberts said.

Fontneau, though, said the exchange’s leaders are looking for new revenue sources to keep fees low. The exchange’s main source of funding is a fee on every policy that private companies sell through the exchange. Federal law gives the exchange the authority to branch out into other lines of insurance, she said.

jhanel@durangoherald.com



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