Thread: Obamacare rant
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Old 04-14-2014, 11:14 AM   #6
kathrynhr
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Default Re: Obamacare rant

Quote:
Originally Posted by ZombieBerry View Post
Why didn't you just register one of the other three ways? Person, Phone, or paper application?
I assure you, I was on the phone with them repeatedly.

Apparently, apart from all the glitches, blended families just aren't being handled well. Their entire system hooks into the IRS, and it assumes that you're insuring the kids you claim on your taxes. And only those kids. In fact, their definition of a family seems to be "the people you list on your 1040."

The problem is that frequently following a divorce, parents claim the kids on taxes during alternating years (e.g. mom gets the tax break during even years, dad during odd years). My husband and I are both in that scenario. And we are required to insure my kids but not his. So we are insuring some kids that we are not claiming on taxes, and not insuring other kids that we are claiming.

The fact that neither the web site nor the representatives were prepared to handle this situation caused chaos. The web site basically refused to process my application in places because it looked like I was selectively refusing to insure our children. And it sounded like the "who's on first" skit when I tried to do it over the phone. Not the fault of the representatives, to be sure, but over and over again, I had to explain the situation and some folks didn't get it. One very helpful rep tried to get our exes' tax information into the system as well, hoping that inputting who WAS claiming the kids would get us over the application hump. But when he put it in, the software tried to add our exes in as our dependents too (!!!), and we couldn't just delete them out again. It corrupted the whole application. And yet again, we started over.

Then when the site (or the call center's software) would have a glitch, they'd punt. "Sorry, we'll call you back." But a different person would call me back, or course, and then we'd start the whole conversation again. And as I indicated above, whenever we'd hit a wall with this, they'd tell me to start the whole application process over.

No, after experiencing the lack of knowledge about blended families that I encountered over the phone, I would not have tried to do this on paper. No one there seems to be able to handle out-of-the-box family situations. I have no doubt that we would still be without insurance if I had gone that route.

Last edited by kathrynhr; 04-14-2014 at 11:18 AM..
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