Data hub woes hit HealthSource RI [The Providence Journal, R.I.]

Oct. 31--Recurrent problems with the federal data hub are preventing some Rhode Islanders from enrolling in health insurance.

Until this week, the state's Obamacare website, HealthSource RI, has been largely unaffected by the technical failures bedeviling the federal website.But a key aspect of the enrollment process depends on a federal entity -- the federal data hub, run by Verizon Communication's Terremark unit.

And the hub has run into trouble.

The data hub verifies identities and checks eligibility for federal subsidies. One of the first steps in filling out a Rhode Island application is to verify your identity through the hub. When the website first opened, the hub was slow and some people could not complete their applications. But those problems were quickly resolved, officials said.

Then, on Sunday, the data hub crashed and was out of service for about 24 hours, preventing some 300 Rhode Islanders from moving forward with their applications. It experienced another outage late Tuesday. By Wednesday morning, federal officials said, the hub was back in service for states running their own exchanges, but was "slow."

"I'm told that the hub, while up, is not functioning well for us at this time," Dara Chadwick, spokeswoman for HealthSource RI, said in an email. "Anonymous browse is available to consumers, and we're working on a response plan to make sure that we're able to reach out to anyone who tried to use the system and was inconvenienced by the outage on the federal side."

She had no data on the number of people who have tried and failed to complete their applications because of this problem.

Chadwick said that the agency is looking into a backup plan in case problems persist with the federal data hub.

Rhode Island is among 14 states that are running their own health benefits exchanges, the marketplaces where small businesses and people who buy insurance on their own can shop for policies and apply for premium subsidies. The computer problems dominating the news affect only the 36 states that are relying on a federal exchange. But every state needs access to the data hub.

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