But website users started reported crashes starting around 11:30 a.m. By noon, state IT officials issued a statement saying the MNsure website and nearly 70 other state websites had been experiencing intermittent outages.
“Minnesota IT Services is investigating and we will update with further information as it becomes available,” the statement said.
After the call center opened at 8 a.m., customers started complaining about waits that exceeded an hour in some cases. In comments to reporters Tuesday, Gov. Mark Dayton said the state’s IT division had identified the culprit behind the robocalls, with wait times being improved as a result.
“It’s deplorable that somebody or anybody is trying to disrupt this,” Dayton said. “They’ve excluded whatever the source is.”
Tuesday is the start of open enrollment in the state’s individual market, where about 250,000 Minnesotans buy health insurance. Those shoppers have the option of buying through MNsure, a government-run health exchange website that Minnesota launched in late 2013 to implement the federal Affordable Care Act.
MNsure suffered a rocky rollout three years ago, but the problems took weeks to surface. This year, troubles are surfacing on the open day of open enrollment likely because enrollment caps for most insurers in the market have created a strong incentives for shoppers to buy early.
Before the technical issues and robocalls were disclosed, MNsure consumers said the website experience on Tuesday was a mixed bag, with some finding coverage and others hitting error messages and confusion.
“Right at the moment, I would give it a grade F,” said Mary Enger, 59, who lives near the western Minnesota town of Dawson. “I’m extremely frustrated.”
Marie Harmon, a MNsure spokeswoman, said that by 8 a.m. nearly 12,000 people had started applications, including about 10,300 people who were working on the website at the time.
There were complaints Tuesday on social media about the HealthPartners website, where potential subscribers said they couldn’t enroll in plans. That was true for Kathy Derong, 61, of Vadnais Heights, who turned instead to MNsure.
“It was surprisingly smooth, until the end,” Derong said.
When she finished the MNsure application, Derong said, it wasn’t clear whether her purchase order had gone through. Ultimately, she logged into her account and found she had coverage.
HealthPartners confirmed by social media early Tuesday that the insurer was having website problems. Around 10 a.m. spokesman Vince Rivard wrote by e-mail that people were successfully enrolling through the website, although the process was slowed by “unprecedented call and website traffic.”
“We’re asking enrollees for patience while we work through the issues,” he said.
There were plenty of calls on Tuesday at MNsure, too. Three calls to the exchange shortly after 8 a.m., and two more after 10 a.m., were answered with recorded messages saying: “All circuits are busy.”
A third call after 10 a.m. got through to the MNsure call center, but ended about three minutes later with the message: “We are experiencing a large volume of calls at this time. Please call back later.”
Regulators say that the individual health insurance market that was on the brink of collapse this summer, as health insurers threatened pullouts amid mounting financial losses.
To keep insurers in the market, state regulators are letting four of five health insurers cap their enrollment for 2017. That means if people don’t buy coverage quickly, they could find their preferred health plan options is no longer available.
Char Loving of Golden Valley said she spent more than three hours trying to buy coverage through the MNsure website on Tuesday morning, but couldn’t get past error messages. She started calling the MNsure call center at 8 a.m., but couldn’t get through.
The experience has been frustrating, Loving said, especially since the plan she wants to buy has an enrollment cap, so she needs to shop early.
“Not to mention the crazy costs we are all forced to pay right now,” Loving added via e-mail.
Premiums for next year are jumping an average of 50 percent to 67 percent. Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota suspended plans covering 103,000 people, and HealthPartners pulled back from dozens of counties impacting about 9,100 people. All of those current subscribers must find new coverage.
Enger, the shopper from western Minnesota, is one of those subscribers being dropped by Blue Cross. She was on the website at 6:01 a.m., she said, trying to buy a policy from Minnetonka-based Medica.
In Enger’s portion of Minnesota, she has a choice of Medica or HMO coverage from Blue Cross. But only Medica includes her primary clinic in its network of providers, Enger said. Plus, Medica has an enrollment cap, which means she might be left with only the option of the Blue Cross HMO.
Around 11 a.m. on Tuesday, Enger said she wasn’t entirely clear if she had signed up for the plan. She seemed to get the job done on her home computer, but hit an error message.
Enger couldn’t get help from the MNsure call center, so she drove into town for help from a MNsure-certified enrollment counselor. That process also ended with a different sort of uncertainty, which wasn’t resolved despite hours on hold with the MNsure call center.
“I think I’m enrolled,” Enger said, “but now I’m enrolled in the same plan twice.”
The individual market is undergoing significant change with the federal Affordable Care Act, which launch new health exchange websites like Minnesota’s MNsure. The health law prevents insurers from denying coverage to people based on preexisting health conditions, but the change has made it difficult for carriers in Minnesota and across the country to make the business profitable.
Reporter Ricardo Lopez contributed to this report.
©2016 the Star Tribune (Minneapolis) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
