Obamacare’s 8 million “enrollments” may not be quite as high as the administration is claiming not just because people have to pay for their plans first, but because a non-negligible number of the enrollments were duplicates, some large insurance providers say.
Mark Pratt, an executive at America’s Health Insurance Plans, a trade group for the industry, told the New York Times on Tuesday that “insurers have many duplicate enrollments in their system for which they never received any payment.”
It could “be a matter of months” before insurers sort out which enrollees will be paying, Pratt added.
On Wednesday, Pratt appeared with five other representatives from different insurance companies before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. During the hearing, some of the panelists raised questions about problems still facing the HealthCare.gov. For example, Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association executive Frank Coyne told the committee “there are still issues on the backend,” while Aetna’s Paul Wingle said “there’s still work to be done.”