Federal health insurance exchange program managers still want toget agents and brokers involved with enrolling consumers inexchange plans.

The HealthCare.gov exchange enrollment system team talked onOct. 11 about trying to "stoke the furnace" for recruiting moreagents and brokers for the exchange distribution team.

"Trying to bring in 60,000 more," according to anew batch of confidential HealthCare.gov "war roomnotes" posted on the House Oversight and GovernmentReform website Monday.

Members of the HealthCare.gov war room team also have beentalking about the mechanics of supplementing use of the troubledWeb site with paper applications.

Consumers had submitted at least 3,000 paper applications byOct. 18, and, as of Oct. 11, the HealthCare.gov call center wasgetting about 30,000 requests for paper applications per day.

The workers processing the paper applications noted thatconsumers with paper applications were submitting many supplementaldocuments, including copies of documents not requested on theapplication, and that some consumers were sending envelopescontaining only supplemental documents and nothing else.

The Center for Consumer Information & InsuranceOversight — the unit of the U.S. Department of Health and HumanServices that's in charge of overseeing the Patient Protection andAffordable Care Act exchange program — created the "war room" totry to resolve problems at the HealthCare.gov exchange enrollmentsite.

Part of the site serves the 36 HHS-run "federal exchanges."Another part, a "data services hub," helps verify health programapplicant eligibility information for both the HHS exchanges andstate-based exchanges.

CCIIO and its parent, HHS, have given little information aboutthe nature of the HealthCare.gov problems or efforts made to fixthe problems. HHS has given the names of some top "technologysurge" project leaders, but has declined during press briefingseven to say how many people are on the surge team.

In the war room notes, team members give many more details aboutwhat's been going wrong and some information about how CCIIO hasbeen trying to fix the problems.

The team found, for example, that both consumers and would-beexchange agents were having trouble with "identity management" —logging in — but that consumers and agents were having similartypes of identity management problems with completely differentidentity management systems.

The team noted in discussions about erroneous plan data that, insome cases, they might be able to cope with the problems by simplyeliminating consumers' ability to buy coverage from some issuers insome counties. But others noted that this would approach would cutdown on the number of plans that consumers can buy and that, forthis year, at least, HealthCare.gov ought to try to fix informationproblems rather than eliminating the plan options associated withthe jumbled information.

See also:

• HealthCare.gov war room exposed problems
• CGIwanted help weeks ago
• CMS reacts to HealthCare.gov project report