New York’s Health Exchange Success

New York State, a blue one, shows how states that fully participated in Obamacare implementation did well, and did right by their citizens.

While federal officials have scrambled to fix their glitch-ridden online insurance exchange, New York’s Obamacare rollout — despite some initial hiccups — has become one of the initiative’s biggest success stories, officials and analysts said.

“It’s working great,” said Elisabeth Benjamin of the Community Service Society of New York, a nonprofit group that helps people navigate the state’s health exchange. “We are enrolling people like gangbusters.”

New York’s enrollment numbers far surpass those posted by the federal government and rank third among the 16 states and the District of Columbia that operate health insurance exchanges, according to figures tracked by the Kaiser Family Foundation.//

Only California, with 214,891 Medicaid and insurance enrollees, and Washington state, with 130,575, have had more success than New York, according to Kaiser…

For starters, the executive order signed by Gov. Cuomo in April 2012 to create the exchange mandated that it be run entirely by the Health Department, which already ran the state’s Medicaid programs.

“That was a very important decision and one that was reached in part because of the need to have a marketplace that was integrated and coordinated with our public health insurance programs,” said Donna Frescatore, executive director of New York’s insurance exchange.

The state also chose a single contractor to develop the website and all the information management systems.

By: Alan

Alan Colmes is the publisher of Liberaland.