Long waits frustrate callers to health exchanges

ANNAPOLIS, Md. — For those trying to enroll through online health exchanges, help has long been advertised as just a phone call away.

Yet the challenge in some states has been trying to get a call through at all, never mind the multiple transfers once contact has been made.

Long wait times of an hour or more have been commonplace in some states, primarily those running their own health care exchanges. California, Maryland, Minnesota, Nevada and Washington are among the states in which consumers and insurance agents have complained. One consequence is that people just give up because they are unable to wait indefinitely.

“If I had to use one word, I’d use ‘frustrating,’” said Jacki Manley, a stay-at-home mom in the western Maryland town of Keedysville, who has been trying since mid-December to enroll in a health plan through that state’s health exchange.

With a child who is almost 3 and another who is 5 months, the 20 minutes she can spare on hold often have not been enough. She estimates she has reached someone at the Maryland call center three out of about a dozen times she has called, but then she gets passed between different people and cannot get definitive answers to her questions.

“It just seems like all the right connections aren’t being made,” Manley said, adding that she believes she has successfully enrolled her children but is unsure whether she and her husband have been enrolled after more than two months of trying.

Manley said she has given up calling. Now, she uses Facebook to try to get the help she needs.

The telephone frustration is just one more obstacle consumers are facing as the March 31 deadline for open enrollment approaches. Technical glitches and software meltdowns on the federal and some state-run exchanges deterred many people from signing up after enrollments under the federal Affordable Care Act began in October.

With many of those technical problems solved, enrollments across the country have been brisk since the start of the year. Yet even with 4 million signed up for policies through the exchanges, the Obama administration will be challenged to meet its own projection of 7 million enrollees by the deadline.

Long wait times for consumer won’t help.

In Nevada, Claudia Lamb complained publicly about spending more than 100 hours on the phone to a call center, then waiting by her phone for hours more for return calls that never came.

Lamb and her husband first tried to apply in early October when the system went live, but she only received confirmation they had been insured on Feb. 12. That was 129 days after she first applied.

“I once waited three hours and 40 minutes to get through to a manager who cycled the problem back through to his subordinate,” Lamb testified about her experience with Nevada Health Link, the state’s exchange. “The subordinate’s solution was to do another application.”

Wait times for call centers on the federal marketplace that is running in 36 states have been much shorter to reach a customer service representative. The average wait time in October was just more than one minute, dropping to 38 seconds in November. It rose to about eight-and-a-half minutes in December, when more people were trying to get coverage for Jan. 1.

The federal call centers have about 14,000 employees.

Officials in some states, including Maryland, Nevada and California, have taken steps to address the long wait times.

Nevada has boosted its call center staff from 50 to nearly 250, and wait times reportedly have been reduced significantly.