Mark
Miller AUGUST 22, 2019
CHICAGO (Reuters) -
(The opinions expressed here are those of the author, a columnist for Reuters.)
Medicare experts often
advise enrollees to re-shop their plan coverage during the annual fall open
enrollment period. This is the time when you can make unlimited changes to your
prescription drug or Medicare Advantage coverage, and shopping the market can
help you save money and make sure you get a best-fit plan.
The shopping trip
often begins with the Medicare Plan Finder - the official government site that
posts plan offerings (bit.ly/2IDFHEJ).
The plan finder allows you to plug in your Medicare number and list of
medications, and then displays local options that fit your needs, and premiums
you will pay.
But Plan Finder has
some problems. Studies have found that users are often confused by the site’s
navigation, and that information is often incomplete or incorrect. Even expert
counselors who are trained to help enrollees with their selections give the
site poor marks when it comes to ease of finding information, incomplete
information and how pricing is displayed.
Now, the Centers for
Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is preparing to relaunch the Plan Finder
website in order to address some of the problems. CMS will introduce the new
site by Labor Day on Sept. 2, according to Raymond Thorn, a spokesman.
The CMS declined to
answer detailed questions about the new website in advance of its own rollout
communication efforts.
Organizations that
help enrollees with plan selection who have had an early peek at the new Plan
Finder are cautiously optimistic about improvements. But they worry that the
timing of the new website’s rollout will leave insufficient training time
before the critical fall enrollment period, which runs from Oct. 15 through
Dec. 7. The old and new sites are expected to run in parallel through the end
of September, according to advocates who have been briefed by CMS.
“There won’t be time
for people like us to test the site to find bugs and get familiar with it,”
said Jo Murphy, executive director of Michigan’s State Health Insurance
Assistance Program (SHIP). All 50 states have SHIPs, which are a federally
funded national network that provides free Medicare counseling using
volunteers. “You certainly want people like us to be familiar with the new
site, since so many beneficiaries who don’t have the internet or understand it
come to us for help - we need to know what we’re doing.”
ADDRESSING SHORTCOMINGS
Few would debate that
the Plan Finder needs improvement. A recent report by the U.S. Government
Accountability Office (GAO) found major usability problems with the current
site. The study included interviews with beneficiary advocacy groups, private
insurers who sell policies on Plan Finder and 41 SHIP directors.
SHIP directors and
other stakeholders reported that the current Plan Finder provides incomplete
cost estimates for enrollees facing one of the most critical enrollment
decisions - whether to enroll in original fee-for-service Medicare or Medicare
Advantage, the commercial managed care alternative. They pointed to search
results for plans that fail to integrate cost information on Medigap plans,
used by many original Medicare enrollees to cap out-of-pocket costs.
“That is a critical
thing to include, because there is no way to make a fair comparison between the
two global choices of original versus Advantage if you can’t factor in the cost
of a Medigap plan,” said James Cosgrove, author of the GAO report and a
director in the healthcare team at GAO.
Survey respondents
also reported that Plan Finder is difficult for beneficiaries to understand,
requiring navigation through “multiple complex pages in order to find and
compare coverage options.” Beneficiaries also must answer questions about their
current coverage and then go through a series of pages and steps before they
can view detailed information on plan options.
Incomplete information
about healthcare providers participating in specific Advantage plans is another
problem noted in the report. “That’s a key piece of information when you’re
choosing a plan,” Cosgrove said, “but it’s more challenging for CMS to address
because it requires the cooperation of plans, and they sometimes don’t get it
right themselves.”
A separate study last
year by two advocacy groups - Clear Choices and the National Council on Aging
(NCOA) - reached conclusions similar to the GAO study findings.
Advocates who have had
an early look at the new site say it is a step in the right direction. “It’s
cleaner, with more white space and easier on the eye,” said Leslie Fried,
senior director of the Center for Benefits Access at NCOA. The Center helps
community-based organizations, including SHIPs, find and enroll Medicare
beneficiaries into programs for which they are eligible. “We think it’s better,
but the jury is still out.”
Fried also worries
about the timing of the rollout, with fall enrollment coming. “They are rushing
this - people who use this and help enroll millions of older adults haven’t
been trained, and they haven’t been able to train their thousands of
volunteers.”
"With any change
of this magnitude, with tens of millions of people relying on a system to make
decisions about HC, you need more than a month,” she said, recalling the
troubled 2013 rollout of the insurance exchange website launched as part of the
Affordable Care Act. (reut.rs/31Uqg34)
“What if there is a
glitch? Does anyone remember what happened with the rollout of HealthCare.gov?”
Reporting and writing by Mark
Miller in Chicago; Editing by Matthew Lewis
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