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U.S. Sen. Murphy: “People desperately want this product”
Obamacare may be flopping nationally, but business is quietly booming in a health care exchange storefront at 55 Church St., where 50 people have been signing up per day.
Kevin Counihan shared that statistic Friday morning at the storefront, which is part of Access Health CT. That’s the state health care exchange set up as part of the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare.
Counihan, the CEO of Access Health, was joined at the storefront by U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy and U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro Friday morning. They were all in town to mark the official opening of the New Haven’s health-exchange outpost, and to brag about Connecticut’s relatively successful Obamacare roll-out.
The Affordable Care Act is designed to extend health insurance coverage to many who can’t now afford it. Each state is required to either set up its own health insurance exchange — a marketplace for different health plans — or tap into a federally created exchange. Connecticut chose the former option.
The law also includes new subsidies for people with low incomes, along with a requirement that people sign up for some kind of insurance.
On the national level, the Obamacare rollout has been plagued by embarrassing screw-ups, including a national website that was barely functional when it debuted.
Meanwhile, Connecticut, which set up its own exchange, is going great guns, according to Counihan, DeLauro and Murphy.
Counihan said Access Health storefronts have been signing up about 50 people per day, each.
Mike Dunn, the store manager, said the operation has been open for a month. The storefront is decorated with warm colors and photos of smiling people, and staffed by a variety of outreach workers, brokers, and “assistors” who are trained to help people sign up for health insurance. The storefront is designed for people who don’t sign up over the phone or online, people who “don’t want to talk on the phone or aren’t as computer literate.”
That describes Ron Vece (pictured), who was looking into health insurance options Friday with his wife, a self-employed illustrator. He said he can find the on/off switch on a computer and that’s about as far as he gets. “I use a piece of paper. I could never do this on my own,” he said, sitting down with an assistor and a laptop PC.
Vece said he hasn’t had health insurance for about 10 years, because it’s so expensive. Vece, who’s disabled after a car accident, said he’s seen quotes as high as $35,000 a year. He’d have to sell his house to afford it, he said.
“We are the only state in the nation having this kind of accessibility for people,” said DeLauro (pictured). The congresswoman, a cancer survivor, said she’ll be signing up with the exchange herself.
“We have crossed 30,000 sign-ups in Connecticut,” said Murphy. Connecticut is surpassing its goals because it is “working to implement the law, not undermine it,” said Murphy.
When Obamacare is made accessible to people, “you find that people desperately want this product,” he said.
Murphy said “there’s no excuse” for the federal website not being ready when it debuted. But, he said, the “record numbers” are now signing up, after a round of bug fixes.
Obamacare is not flopping nationally. Nice rhetoric, but not true. Certainly, too soon to make that conclusion.