��ϳԹ�� News Editors, Author at ��ϳԹ�� News

Deadline Today For 300,000 To Prove They Should Get Subsidies

��ϳԹ�� News Editors — Tue, 30 Sep 2014 19:05:07 +0000

KHN’s Julie Rovner was on WBUR’s Here and Now Tuesday morning to talk about the 300,000 people who stand to lose their health law subsidies if they don’t prove by today that they are eligible to get them.

Listen to audio of the interview below:

��ϳԹ�� News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about .

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California Program Trains Young Men To Change Their Lives By Saving Others

��ϳԹ�� News Editors — Fri, 26 Sep 2014 12:10:29 +0000

On , KHN’s Sarah Varney reported on an innovative program in Oakland, Calif., that trains at risk youths to be emergency medical technicians. Watch the video below and .

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What’s Next In The Wake Of Conflicting Federal Court Decisions

��ϳԹ�� News Editors — Wed, 23 Jul 2014 12:17:35 +0000

KHN’s Julie Rovner and SCOTUSblog’s Tom Goldstein Tuesday to discuss the implications of that disagreed about the legality of selling subsidized insurance on healthcare.gov.

Watch the video below.

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Penalizing Hospitals For Being Unsafe: Why Adverse Events Are A Big Problem

��ϳԹ�� News Editors — Wed, 25 Jun 2014 16:19:47 +0000

A published Sunday about upcoming hospital penalties included an analysis of Medicare data by Dr. Ashish K. Jha, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health. This week, Jha also wrote up . Originally posted on , Dr. Jha’s copyrighted assessment is republished below, all rights reserved:

By Ashish K. Jha

Adverse events — when bad things happen to patients because of what we as medical professionals do — are a leading cause of suffering and death in the U.S. and globally. Indeed, as I have written before, patient safety is a major issue in American healthcare, and one that has gotten far too little attention. Tens of thousands of Americans die needlessly because of preventable infections, medication errors, surgical mishaps, and so forth., according to , when an older American walks into a hospital, he or she has about a 1 in 4 chance of suffering some sort of injury during their stay. Many of these are debilitating, life-threatening, or even fatal. Things are not much better for younger Americans.

Given the magnitude of the problem, . Well, things are changing – and while some of that change is good, some of it worries me. Congress, as part of the Affordable Care Act, required Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to penalize hospitals that had high rates of “HACs” – Hospital Acquired Conditions. CMS has done the best it can, putting together a combination of infections (as identified through clinical surveillance and reported to the CDC) and other complications (as identified through the Patient Safety Indicators, or PSIs). PSIs are useful – they use algorithms to identify complications coded in the billing data that hospitals send to CMS. However, there are three potential problems with PSIs: hospitals vary in how hard they look for complications, they vary in how diligently they code complications, and finally, although PSIs are risk-adjusted, their risk-adjustment is not very good — and sicker patients generally have more complications.

So, HACs are imperfect — but the bottom line is, every metric is imperfect. Are HACs particularly imperfect? Are the problems with HACs worse than with other measures? I think we have some reason to be concerned.

HACs – Who Gets Penalized?

Our team was asked by . He sent along a database that listed CMS’s calculation of the HAC score for every hospital, and the worst 25 percent that were likely to get penalized. So, we ran some numbers, looking at characteristics of hospitals that do and do not get penalized:

These are bivariate relationships — that is, major teaching hospitals were 2.9 times more likely to be penalized than non-teaching hospitals. This does not simultaneously adjust for the other characteristics because as a policy matter, it’s the unadjusted value that matters. If you want to understand to what degree academic hospitals are being penalized because they also happen to be large, then you need multivariate analyses — and therefore, we went ahead and ran a multivariable model — and even in the multivariable model (logistic model with each of the above variables in the model), the results are qualitatively similar although not all the differences remain statistically significant.

What Does This Mean?

So how should we interpret these data? A simple way to think about it is this: who is getting penalized? Large, urban, public, teaching hospitals in the Northeast with lots of poor patients. Who is not getting penalized? Small, rural, for-profit hospitals in the South. Here are the data from the multivariable model: The chances that a large, urban, public, major teaching hospital that has lots of poor patients (i.e. top quartile of DSH Index) will get the HAC penalty? 62 percent. The chances that a small, rural, for-profit, non-teaching hospital in the south with very few poor patients will get the penalty? 9 percent.

Is that a problem? You could make the argument that these large, Northeastern teaching hospitals are terrible places to get care – while the hospitals that are really doing it well are the small, rural, for-profit hospitals in the south. May be. I suspect this is much more about the underlying patient population and vigilance than actual safety. Beth Isarel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) in Boston is one of the very few hospitals in the country with exceptionally low mortality rates across all three publicly reported conditions and . And yet, it is being penalized as being one of the hospitals with, according to the HAC metric, a poor record on safety. So is Brigham and Women’s (though I’m affiliated there, so watch my bias) – a pioneer in patient safety whose chief quality and safety officer is , one of nation’s foremost safety gurus. So are the Cleveland Clinic and Barnes Jewish, RWJF Medical Center, LDS Hospital in Salt Lake, and Indiana University Hospital, to name a few.

So what are we to do? Is this just whining that our metrics aren’t perfect? Don’t we have to do something to move the needle on patient safety? Absolutely. But, we are missing a great opportunity to do something much more useful. Patient safety as a field has been stuck. It’s been 15 years since the IOM’s To Err is Human report came out – and by all counts, progress . Therefore, I am completely on board with the sentiment behind Congressional intent and CMS’s efforts. We have to do something – but I think we should do something a little different.

If you look across the safety landscape, one thing becomes clear: when we have good measures, we make progress. We have made modest improvements in hospital acquired infections – because of tremendous work by the CDC (and their clinically-based National Hospital Surveillance Network) that collects good data on patient safety and feeds it back to hospitals. We have also made some progress on surgical complications, partly because a group of hospitals are willing to collect high quality data, and feed it back to their institutions. But the rest of the field of patient safety? Not so much. What we need are good measures. And, luckily, there is still a window of opportunity if we are willing to make patient safety a priority.

How to Move Forward

This gets us to the actual solution: harnessing the power of meaningful use in the Electronic Health Records incentive program. We need clinically-based, high quality patient safety metrics. Electronic health records can capture these far more effectively than billing codes can. The federal government is giving out billions of dollars to doctors and hospitals that “meaningfully use” certified EHRs. A couple of years ago, David Classen and I wrote a that outlined how the federal government, if it wanted to be serious about patient safety, could require, that EHR systems measure, track, and feed back patient safety events as part of certification and requirements for meaningful use. The technology is there. Lots of companies have developed adverse event monitoring tools. It just requires someone to decide that improving patient safety is important — and that clinically-based metrics are useful.

So here we are — HACs. Well intentioned — and a step forward, I think, in the effort to make healthcare better. Everyone I know thinks HACs have important limitations – but reasonable people disagree over whether their flaws make them unusable for financial incentives or not. The good news is that all of us can agree that we can do much better. And now is the time to do it.

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‘Right-To-Try’ Laws On Experimental Drugs Stir Debate

��ϳԹ�� News Editors — Tue, 24 Jun 2014 17:00:17 +0000

KHN’s Julie Rovner participated in a Google Hangout with PBS NewsHour on state “right-to-try” laws, first approved in Colorado, which allow terminally ill patients to try potentially life-saving, but unapproved drugs to treat their conditions. Watch the discussion below:

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Talking Medicare’s Hospital Fines For Too Many Patient Injuries

��ϳԹ�� News Editors — Mon, 23 Jun 2014 16:44:52 +0000

KHN’s Jordan Rau was on NPR and C-SPAN Monday to talk about coming Medicare penalties for about a quarter of the nation’s hospitals as detailed in his story.

The penalties will ding hospitals up to 1 percent of their Medicare pay for having higher rates of patient injuries. Watch the C-SPAN video interview and listen to the NPR audio of his conversation below:

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The Continuing Drama Over Medicaid Expansion

��ϳԹ�� News Editors — Wed, 11 Jun 2014 14:01:26 +0000

With Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe throwing in the towel in his effort to push a Medicaid expansion through the state’s General Assembly, KHN’s Julie Rovner to discuss where Medicaid expansion stands in states across the country. Watch that conversation in the video below.

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How Are Insurers Responding To New Health Law Enrollees?

��ϳԹ�� News Editors — Mon, 21 Apr 2014 17:37:41 +0000

KHN’s Jay Hancock was on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal Monday morning to talk about how insurers are responding to the health law. Hancock said the 8 million new customers have insurers pondering who they, how sick they are and how the new enrollees may affect insurance rates in 2015.

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What Consumers Can Learn From Medicare Payment Data

��ϳԹ�� News Editors — Thu, 10 Apr 2014 12:37:46 +0000

Wednesday the federal government published details on Medicare’s $77 billion in payments to physicians, drug testing companies and other medical practitioners during 2012.

KHN’s Jordan Rau, who reported on , discussed Medicare payments to providers with NPR’s Melissa Block on “” Wednesday night. Audio of that conversation and a transcript follow.

NPR’s MELISSA BLOCK: [Wednesday], for the first time, the agency that runs the Medicare program has released data showing how much doctors get paid by the government for everything from office visits to surgical procedures to chemotherapy. It’s a massive amount of data that may help patients learn more about how their doctor practices medicine.

The data are sure to provide some interesting insights, but there are also limits to how much can be learned. And joining me in the studio now to talk more about this is Jordan Rau with our partner Kaiser Health News. Jordan, thanks for coming in.

KHN’s JORDAN RAU: Glad to be here.

MELISSA BLOCK: Why don’t you tell us first just exactly what the government released today in this massive data dump?

JORDAN RAU: They put down an entire year’s worth of billing that doctors did to Medicare, and it’s huge. It’s 880,000 different doctors billing about $77 billion, and it’s on over 6,000 different procedures — everything from an office visit to a very complicated chemotherapy to the use of a helicopter or an airplane to transport a patient.

MELISSA BLOCK: And just to be clear, this is doctor information. It doesn’t include patient names.

JORDAN RAU: There’s no patient information. In fact, the release was designed to protect patient privacy, and the way that they did that was, aside from obviously not naming the patients, they only included procedures where a doctor had done it a bunch of times, so that you could not be identified even by the nurse or the receptionist in the actual doctor’s office.

MELISSA BLOCK: We mentioned this is being released for the first time. Why wasn’t it released before now?

JORDAN RAU: Well, for three decades, the American Medical Association has blocked the release of this data through a court order. They didn’t want it to come out because some of it, way back during the Carter administration, was inaccurate. In fact, one Michigan doctor was described as having billed $150,000 when he actually billed $15,000. And so they’ve been successful in that case until recently when The Wall Street Journal sued and was able to overturn that injunction.

MELISSA BLOCK: There are a number of headlines run that are framing the conclusion of these data as being that a very tiny sliver of doctors, two percent, are accounting for something like 25 percent of the total Medicare payments, that $77 billion number. Does that seem like a fair characterization to you of what you’re learning?

JORDAN RAU: Well, to some extent, it’s not surprising. You’re going to have some doctors that do an enormous amount very expensive procedures on the spine or neurologists or transplants, and so those are going to take up a large amount of the bills. But overall, I’m not sure that that’s going to tell us anything that’s that useful. It’s not that a huge amount, 1 percent or 2 percent, are just ripping off the system and driving around in expensive Maseratis.

MELISSA BLOCK: So what is the point then? What’s the idea behind releasing these numbers?

JORDAN RAU: Well, to some extent it’s the government’s biggest effort at crowdsourcing. I mean, they want everyone to dig in and look for waste, fraud and abuse and questionable billing practices. But the other thing is to shine a lot of light on where Medicare’s money goes to show that some doctors are performing really, really expensive procedures when there might be cheaper ones; to see why, in some areas of the country, doctors are spending a lot more of Medicare taxpayers’ dollars than for doctors in the other areas of the country doing the exact same thing.

MELISSA BLOCK:And from the patient’s perspective, if I were to be looking at these numbers trying to figure out anything about doctors or a procedure I might be interested in, what would I learn?

JORDAN RAU: Well, you probably wouldn’t learn that much. There’s no quality information to show how well a surgery actually turned out. There’s a possibility that a lot of what a doctor did is not for Medicare, so you might not even know that they did a lot of stuff for private insurance. It might be useful, theoretically, if you love to spend time with an Excel spreadsheet, it might be helpful to take a look and find doctors that do something that’s very unusual. If you happen to be looking for a particular type of transplant or chemotherapy, it might help winnow that down. But otherwise, I would be very careful about drawing any conclusions about any individual doctor from this.

MELISSA BLOCK: Jordan Rau is a reporter with Kaiser Health News. Jordan, thanks.

JORDAN RAU: Thank you.

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Healthcare.gov Woes Frustrate In-Person Helpers Around The Country

��ϳԹ�� News Editors — Tue, 01 Apr 2014 11:42:32 +0000

Last minute health insurance shoppers nationwide turned up in record numbers online Monday, and they also showed up in person at clinics, county health departments and libraries to sign up for Obamacare on the last official day of open enrollment. Here are dispatches from public radio reporters in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Houston — three of the 36 states that are using healthcare.gov — and Minnesota, which has one of the most troubled state-run marketplaces.

OBSTACLES IN CLEVELAND:
A steady stream of people filed through the doors of the Neighborhood Family Practice, a free clinic on Cleveland’s near west side Monday, but Leah Pallant, an outreach and enrollment coordinator at the clinic expected many of them to leave without actually selecting a plan before the midnight deadline.

“The website is already in and out,” Pallant said. “The number of people on the website really made it difficult to keep working, because it basically just shuts you out entirely when they have too many visitors.”

Care coordinators constructed an inspirational billboard for folks signing up at the Neighborhood Family Practice (Photo by Sarah Jane Tribble/WCPN).

Federal officials said more than 1.2 million people from around the country had visited by noon Monday, and the site was handling as many as 125,000 people at a time. The site was down from about 3:20 a.m. until 9 a.m. for maintenance and then again later midday; at other points during the day it shunted people into a “virtual waiting room.”

Coordinators in Ohio and across the country encountered many of the same problems as people trying to sign up at home.

Pallant’s colleague, coordinator Jackie Mostow, was working with Cleveland resident Callie Williams. “We can try,” Mostow told Williams, “but what we might end up doing is trying to create an account and we’ll schedule you an appointment to come back.”

Williams, who hasn’t had insurance since the 1990s, said she is willing to wait a bit longer. “Just schedule me an appointment to come back,” she said.

Joyce Jones, who works two part-time jobs, arrived at the clinic late Monday morning after trying to use the website on her own. “I didn’t like what I was seeing because as you look at the deductibles, all I can say is ‘wow,’ because you have to pay all that before your bill even gets paid,” Jones said. “So that’s why I chose to come in to talk about it and see if I can get a better plan.”

In Ohio, 83 percent of those who have signed up for plans on the exchange have qualified for financial assistance. And Jones will have more time to shop due to another late change in the rules. Federal officials have said they will grant extensions to those who tried to start an application on the website and couldn’t finish.

— Sarah Jane Tribble,

OPEN LATE IN HOUSTON:
Local health officials say sign-ups in the Houston area reached 114,000 a week ago.

But a crush of last-minute enrollments over the past few days could push the final tally much higher, and city officials announced that six community centers would stay open until 10 p.m. Monday to allow people more time to try to enroll.

At the city’s service center on the southwest side Monday afternoon, more than 200 people were crowded into the lobby, and down two hallways. There were seven health care navigators on site, according to Solly Diaz, a division manager for the city.

“We expected, and we braced ourselves for it,” Diaz said. “We definitely ramped up our capacity. But even with that, the volume of walk-ins that we got was truly overwhelming.”

Navigators like Sandra Rodriguez helped clients do the bare minimum: set up an account, which would at least qualify them for an extension until mid-April. Around 2 p.m., Rodriguez turned from her keyboard, announcing a digital breakthrough.

“So now at 1:53 in the afternoon, after I’ve tried since 8:00 in the morning, we’re able to get into the system,” she said. “We’re going to start the application.”

The lucky client at that moment was Pamela Thompson, 50, a food worker in the Cy-Fair school district. Thompson recently found out she has high blood pressure, and she also had the flu this winter.

“I’ve been needing insurance because, you know, I stay sickly lately,” she said. “And when I want to go the doctor I have to pay out-of-pocket to go.”

Thompson’s income hovers near the poverty line, between $11,000 and $12,000 a year. Rodriguez warned Thompson she might fall into a gap under the law: she might not earn enough to qualify for an insurance subsidy, and Texas isn’t offering Medicaid to poor adults in her income range.

Across the city, Francisco Juarez was waiting for help at the Multi-Service Center in Denver Harbor. Jaurez, 55, works for a small metal fabrication company. “They’ve been promising us insurance and to this day we still don’t have any,” he said.

Juarez has heart trouble and diabetes. But he hasn’t seen a cardiologist in nine months, and he can’t afford his prescriptions. “My heart,” he said softly. “My heart’s only 25 percent, and I’ve got three clogged arteries. So it’s pretty serious. I need to get some insurance somewhere.”

Juarez clutched a folded paper with his account information from healthcare.gov. He had left work early, without telling anyone where he was going, hoping to see a navigator who could help him choose a plan before the deadline.

— Carrie Feibel,

BILINGUAL HELP IN PHILADELPHIA:
By midafternoon Monday, at Latino service agency Congreso in North Philadelphia, about 50 people were signed in, the list growing, waiting to meet with Congreso’s bilingual staff.

“Actually, what you see here right now is half of what was here earlier this morning,” said Jose Rivera, Congreso’s vice president of health services.

Rivera says he’s excited they’ve been able to connect with so many people, even as Latino enrollment nationwide appears to be low. Twenty employees have become certified application counselors at Congreso, according to Rivera, in addition to their regular jobs. Counselors reported long waits getting through to the Spanish-speaking help line on Monday.

Elvia Mejia,64, is holding out hope that she’ll be able to sign up. She’s uninsured, diabetic, and has struggled to pay for medicine costing upwards of $500 a month on her own. Mejia joined family living in the United States three years ago, and while she may not be eligible for other federal health programs until she has been in the country for five years, the Affordable Care Act has no time requirement for immigrants in the country legally to be eligible for financial assistance purchasing coverage through the marketplace, if their income qualifies.

— Elana Gordon,

MINNESOTA TAKES A BREAK:
MNsure, the agency that runs Minnesota’s online insurance marketplace, will take the website offline for about 48 hours starting at midnight Tuesday to perform site maintenance. It is scheduled to come back up on Thursday morning. The contact center will remain open.

The troubled exchange had braced for high volume Monday and procrastinators didn’t disappoint them, as the call center fielded a record 16,000 calls.

The website slowed, but it did not buckle as it did Dec. 31, the last big deadline for enrolling in coverage. On that day, frustrated Minnesotan overwhelmed the call center.

But Monday’s rush showed that the MNsure website has improved.

“We’ve added additional capacity for the surge to the site to ensure that people are able to get in and that the system itself can handle additional volume,” interim CEO Scott Leitz said. “Beyond that, we’re monitoring by the minute the stability of the site and where things are at.”

Following an independent consultant’s advice, MNsure also added 100 representatives to its call center.

Counties have a separate access point to MNsure called a worker portal, which they use to review applications to government programs such as Medical Assistance.

Linda Bixby, economic support division manager for Washington County Community Services, said county workers still can’t make the most basic changes to a person’s case. For example, they cannot change an address or close a case for someone who has found a job that provides health insurance. “I personally have serious concerns about the functionality,” she said.

MNsure officials say there are still hundreds of people stuck in insurance limbo, whose cases are deemed “pending.”

One of them is Susan Leem of St. Paul, a married mother of two, whose current insurance expires on Tuesday. On March 6, when she first applied, the MNsure site said her husband qualified for MinnesotaCare, a plan for “residents who do not have access to affordable health care coverage.” The site said she and the children qualified for Medical Assistance, the state’s Medicaid program, but Leem doubts that because of her income. She needs coverage to begin Tuesday, but her case is still pending.

“For me it’s the not knowing,” she said.

“If they end up having to go to the doctor or the emergency room, we can work with them to make sure that if they’re eligible for one of our public programs, that they’re getting the coverage they need and it will be retroactive,” Human Service Commissioner Lucinda Jesson said.

But the possibility of retroactive coverage doesn’t give Leem peace of mind. As she cradles her infant son in her lap, she still worries.

“If I get into a car accident and I need emergency surgery and they ask my husband where is your medical card, can he say, pending ‘MNcare?'” she asked. “Maybe they’d reimburse me later; maybe they wouldn’t if my paperwork was not deemed eligible or correct.”

— Elizabeth Stawicki,

This story is part of a reporting partnership that includes , member stations and Kaiser Health News.

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Deadline Today For 300,000 To Prove They Should Get Subsidies

��ϳԹ�� News Editors — Tue, 30 Sep 2014 19:05:07 +0000

Listen to audio of the interview below:

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California Program Trains Young Men To Change Their Lives By Saving Others

��ϳԹ�� News Editors — Fri, 26 Sep 2014 12:10:29 +0000

On , KHN’s Sarah Varney reported on an innovative program in Oakland, Calif., that trains at risk youths to be emergency medical technicians. Watch the video below and .

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What’s Next In The Wake Of Conflicting Federal Court Decisions

��ϳԹ�� News Editors — Wed, 23 Jul 2014 12:17:35 +0000

KHN’s Julie Rovner and SCOTUSblog’s Tom Goldstein Tuesday to discuss the implications of that disagreed about the legality of selling subsidized insurance on healthcare.gov.

Watch the video below.

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Penalizing Hospitals For Being Unsafe: Why Adverse Events Are A Big Problem

��ϳԹ�� News Editors — Wed, 25 Jun 2014 16:19:47 +0000

By Ashish K. Jha

HACs – Who Gets Penalized?

What Does This Mean?

How to Move Forward

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‘Right-To-Try’ Laws On Experimental Drugs Stir Debate

��ϳԹ�� News Editors — Tue, 24 Jun 2014 17:00:17 +0000

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Talking Medicare’s Hospital Fines For Too Many Patient Injuries

��ϳԹ�� News Editors — Mon, 23 Jun 2014 16:44:52 +0000

KHN’s Jordan Rau was on NPR and C-SPAN Monday to talk about coming Medicare penalties for about a quarter of the nation’s hospitals as detailed in his story.

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The Continuing Drama Over Medicaid Expansion

��ϳԹ�� News Editors — Wed, 11 Jun 2014 14:01:26 +0000

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How Are Insurers Responding To New Health Law Enrollees?

��ϳԹ�� News Editors — Mon, 21 Apr 2014 17:37:41 +0000

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What Consumers Can Learn From Medicare Payment Data

��ϳԹ�� News Editors — Thu, 10 Apr 2014 12:37:46 +0000

Wednesday the federal government published details on Medicare’s $77 billion in payments to physicians, drug testing companies and other medical practitioners during 2012.

KHN’s Jordan Rau, who reported on , discussed Medicare payments to providers with NPR’s Melissa Block on “” Wednesday night. Audio of that conversation and a transcript follow.

KHN’s JORDAN RAU: Glad to be here.

MELISSA BLOCK: Why don’t you tell us first just exactly what the government released today in this massive data dump?

MELISSA BLOCK: And just to be clear, this is doctor information. It doesn’t include patient names.

MELISSA BLOCK: We mentioned this is being released for the first time. Why wasn’t it released before now?

MELISSA BLOCK: So what is the point then? What’s the idea behind releasing these numbers?

MELISSA BLOCK: Jordan Rau is a reporter with Kaiser Health News. Jordan, thanks.

JORDAN RAU: Thank you.

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Healthcare.gov Woes Frustrate In-Person Helpers Around The Country

��ϳԹ�� News Editors — Tue, 01 Apr 2014 11:42:32 +0000

Care coordinators constructed an inspirational billboard for folks signing up at the Neighborhood Family Practice (Photo by Sarah Jane Tribble/WCPN).

Coordinators in Ohio and across the country encountered many of the same problems as people trying to sign up at home.

Williams, who hasn’t had insurance since the 1990s, said she is willing to wait a bit longer. “Just schedule me an appointment to come back,” she said.

— Sarah Jane Tribble,

OPEN LATE IN HOUSTON:
Local health officials say sign-ups in the Houston area reached 114,000 a week ago.

“We expected, and we braced ourselves for it,” Diaz said. “We definitely ramped up our capacity. But even with that, the volume of walk-ins that we got was truly overwhelming.”

“So now at 1:53 in the afternoon, after I’ve tried since 8:00 in the morning, we’re able to get into the system,” she said. “We’re going to start the application.”

The lucky client at that moment was Pamela Thompson, 50, a food worker in the Cy-Fair school district. Thompson recently found out she has high blood pressure, and she also had the flu this winter.

“I’ve been needing insurance because, you know, I stay sickly lately,” she said. “And when I want to go the doctor I have to pay out-of-pocket to go.”

— Carrie Feibel,

“Actually, what you see here right now is half of what was here earlier this morning,” said Jose Rivera, Congreso’s vice president of health services.

— Elana Gordon,

The troubled exchange had braced for high volume Monday and procrastinators didn’t disappoint them, as the call center fielded a record 16,000 calls.

The website slowed, but it did not buckle as it did Dec. 31, the last big deadline for enrolling in coverage. On that day, frustrated Minnesotan overwhelmed the call center.

But Monday’s rush showed that the MNsure website has improved.

Following an independent consultant’s advice, MNsure also added 100 representatives to its call center.

Counties have a separate access point to MNsure called a worker portal, which they use to review applications to government programs such as Medical Assistance.

MNsure officials say there are still hundreds of people stuck in insurance limbo, whose cases are deemed “pending.”

“For me it’s the not knowing,” she said.

But the possibility of retroactive coverage doesn’t give Leem peace of mind. As she cradles her infant son in her lap, she still worries.

— Elizabeth Stawicki,

This story is part of a reporting partnership that includes , member stations and Kaiser Health News.

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���ϳԹ��� News Editors, Author at ���ϳԹ��� News

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Deadline Today For 300,000 To Prove They Should Get Subsidies

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Talking Medicare’s Hospital Fines For Too Many Patient Injuries

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How Are Insurers Responding To New Health Law Enrollees?

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Healthcare.gov Woes Frustrate In-Person Helpers Around The Country

��ϳԹ�� News Editors, Author at ��ϳԹ�� News