It's Easier to Apply for a Green Card than Obamacare -
Saturday, April 6, 2013
Source: MarketWatch/Wall Street Journal
Application for new health exchanges includes 61 pages of instructions
If you thought nothing could be more tedious than filling out your tax forms, just wait until you try to apply for health insurance through the Affordable Care Act’s new exchanges.
The draft of the paper application is 15 to 21 pages, depending on whether someone is applying individually or for their family. See the Application for Health Insurance
And the instructions for the application run no less than 61 pages. That’s nearly six times longer than the instructions for a green-card application. (There are also videos of the process.)
“If you like IRS forms, you’re going to love this one,” says Ken Hoagland, chairman of Restore America’s Voice, a conservative organization that advocates for the repeal of the health-care law. “These are the kinds of things that are going to drive people crazy.”
Adding to the confusion from this new bureaucracy is that experts say most Americans are still largely in the dark about what the health-insurance exchanges — the new marketplaces for individual insurance stipulated by the health-reform law — even are. Though government officials are hurrying to set them up before open enrollment for 2014 begins this fall, a survey released today by InsuranceQuotes.com found that 90% of U.S. consumers don’t know that the exchanges open Oct. 1, and 22% said they thought the exchanges were already open now.
That lack of knowledge doesn’t bode well for how consumers will actually manage to sign up for insurance on their own, experts say — something they will have to do or else pay a penalty mandated by the health-reform law.
The Department of Health and Human Services recently released the draft versions of the applications consumers will need to fill out in order to get insurance if they can’t get it through their employer or family. But while the point behind the law and the exchanges is to make it easier for Americans to get health insurance, some consumers are complaining that a major barrier now stands in their way: too much paperwork.
“It’s a lot of information that consumers are going to have to provide, and that could deter people from signing up,” says Laura Adams, senior insurance analyst at InsuranceQuotes.com, part of Bankrate.com, which tracks interest rates. “That could be an issue for some people who don’t like paperwork. And who likes paperwork?”
The forms bring to mind the IRS instructions for filing the 1040 tax form, which is 105 pages long. In fact, many of the questions have less to do with health matters than financial ones.
A little-known government disclosure requirement offers a clue, at least, to how much time it will take consumers to fill out the forms. To comply with the Paperwork Reduction Act, the Health Department had to submit an “Information Collection Request” along with the draft forms, detailing why it is seeking the information and an estimate for how long it will take the public to provide. The online application will take 15 to 30 minutes to complete depending on whether consumers are applying for additional government subsidies, according to the ICR.