With just two weeks left for state and county workers and retirees to verify that their dependents, if any, are eligible to continue to receive health insurance provided by the State Employer-Union Health Benefits Trust Fund, there are more signs that the verification process is flawed.
Elderly retirees, in particular, may face serious issues, especially if they are unable to cope with the confusing process and demand for documentation.
Take the case of my parents. My mother will be 96 in May 2010, and my dad turned 96 early this month. She is a retiree still living at home and still handling most of her own affairs, while my dad is in a nursing home suffering from Alzheimer’s.
Luckily, my mom spoke up before the verification deadline and said she was confused about the EUTF process.
A series of mailings from EUTF and plan administrators about changing health plan choices explained that they did not apply to retirees. Then came the dependent verification mailing. It was hard to sort them all out.
The verification audit sat in her mail for a while, until she finally asked: “Do I have to do anything?”
Actually, I hadn’t paid attention to whether this applied to retirees. I said I would look.
That turned out to be easier said than done.
Despite the fact that failure to complete the process by December 31 will result in loss of health insurance coverage for dependents, there isn’t a single mention of it on the EUTF web site. Search for “dependents” on the web site and you won’t find a thing.
With more extensive digging, I finally found a link where further information was supposed to be available (FYI, it was a link that I can’t recreate now). But even access to information required an employee number, which was on the mailing sent to my mother but that I didn’t have. So I couldn’t check on it for her.
Luckily, my sister, Bonnie, was able to intervene and move the process along.
According to the instructions, my mother has choices.
She can submit her 2008 joint tax return filed as husband/wife. Except that she can’t find where she put last year’s taxes.
She has the choice of submitting a copy of her marriage license and a real property tax bill showing joint ownership. Seriously. Do you know where your marriage license is? And can your mother find her last tax bill?
I doubt that my mother would have completed the the verification audit without substantial assistance. What about others who don’t have family nearby to intervene? What about those who don’t ask for help because they don’t understand what is at stake or find the whole process too confusing?
I think a lot of retirees are going to have these problems. Things get lost in the clutter. Required documentation may be hard to find or nonexistent. Deadlines are difficult to keep in mind. I would guess that a significant number of elders may just give up and hope for the best. Others may be legally eligible but incapable of responding. There appear to be no follow-up procedures before unverified dependents are retroactively cut off from their health insurance coverage.
Prediction: There are going to be many painful stories in a couple of months when retirees find their loved ones denied medical care because EUTF has dropped dependents from the eligible list. The lawsuits probably come later when the bills accumulate. More bad press is not what EUTF needs.
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You are spot on. My wife and I just had to complete this information. We are both attorneys, and this was a time consuming, confusing, and personally invasive process. EUTF needs my tax returns? Are you kidding me? I can easily see the scenario you paint. Many folks, including the elderly, will have difficulty with this process. The result will be uninsured residents and employers in violation of the Prepaid Health Care Act.
this is so, so sad. why does everything have to be so hard?
OK, let me play devil’s advocate here. And perhaps rant a bit.
While I, too, had to go through this process and found it counterintuitive at most every turn, I got through it relatively easily. The contractor was responsive to my questions and, once I procured the necessary documents (which took some doing, but was not terribly difficult), I completed the process online and was “cleared” within a matter of days. We were given 8 weeks to comply, could submit the information three ways, and had a 24 hour phone number to call with questions. What more is it that you folks want?
Even assuming that the process was not perfect and that there ought to be some followup process short of termination for those who just don’t understand, is the real problem that people have a sense of unqualified entitlement? Yes, I was mildly indignant at first because, if anything, I am overcompliant. I informed EUTF that one of my dependents would become ineligible earlier this year before the event even occurred. I am not the problem here but I have to believe that more than a few others may be.
The bottom line here, folks, is that if there are people on the rolls who are not eligible — aged-out children, ex-spouses, whatever — I don’t want to be paying for their medical care. Call me selfish but I have a hard enough time paying my own bills; I don’t need to be paying someone else’s. I hope health care/insurance reform passes and, yes, I know I may have to pay more as a result. I am prepared to pitch in if it’s pursuant to a collectively made policy choice but not if it’s to facilitate someone else’s individually imposed freeloading.
Now, may I suggest that you all keep your eye on the ball and, if the process being used to weed out the cheats needs improvement, make suggestions on how to do so. But let’s not stick our heads in the sand and just be righteously indignant about having to comply with EUTF’s perhaps less than perfect attempts to keep other people’s hands of our pockets.
‘kay den.
The dependent verification procedure has been made more difficult by poorly written instructions & unnecessarily invasive requests for supporting documents. Yes, you can talk to a Secova rep 24/7 but that’s not too comforting when they themselves don’t understand what their company is asking people to do, as was my experience.
On a related matter, the Maui News has several good articles today on the EUTF out-sourcing prescription services to InformedRx. Too bad the Honolulu dailies can’t be bothered to follow these continuing stories.
I am also very disappointed with the process.
As soon as I received the notice via US Mail, I mailed a copy of our 2008 federal tax return.
A few weeks later, I received not one, not two but three notices over a period of three consecutive days via US Mail with an INCOMPLETE DEPENDENT ELIGIBILITY DOCUMENTS block checked off.
I reviewed prior instructions and thought that I mailed the wrong documents. I did not. Rather than mailing my tax return a second time, I decided to fax my tax return to the number listed in these notices.
I tried 6 times in one day with a response of busy or no fax answer. I figured the fax machine was really busy and decided to try later that evening. Same result.
Tried again the following morning with the same response so I called the toll free number. I was surprised with the answer.
“We disconnected that number (866-816-6719). You need to fax to 866-826-6719.”
All I can say is thank goodness for my wife’s reminder to black out our SSNs, mailing address, income and other confidential information. Looks like someone did an oooops and published the wrong fax number?
Abunai!
DRK is correct. I heard that the company did send out letters for incorrect dependent verification documents with the incorrect fax number. Thats why the company sent out at least one more letter (or two) soon after, to correct the error, only they didnt point out the error in the first letter — so if you used the old letter with the mistake as the fax number, you were still screwed.
Ian, for your mom, can you call the company and ask of a joint bank statement would suffice in lieu of a utility bill? Ask to speak to a supervisor and if they say yes, have them document that in the electronic file. That, with a marriage certificate which is pretty easy to obtain over at DOH nowadays, might do the trick for her.
Count me among those that found it offensive to have to prove that my spouse is indeed my spouse. I filed the appropriate docs when we got married just 4 yrs ago. Are non-dependent dependents really that big of a problem to warrant hiring a 3rd-party company to harass us?
Along the lines of confusing instructions, since when does a joint tax return list one spouse as your “dependent?” It doesn’t, yet they ask for a tax return listing them as so.
This whole process has been stressful for me. I can’t find my marriage certificate. We used Turbotax to e-file our tax return last year. The instructions say to provide the “Certificate of Electronic Filing” from the IRS. I never received any such certificate, and I can’t find any mention of it on the IRS website. I tried calling Secova but I was put on hold and lost patience after a while.
So I don’t know if I submitted the info they need. I guess I’ll have to call them and wait on hold.
The casual cruelty of a uncaring bureaucracy that doesn’t have to fill out it’s own paperwork.
well, merry Christmas from EUTF. Checked the mailbox this morning and got a form letter informing me I had submitted only partial verification for my dependent who is away at college. The letter doesn’t say what’s missing so I’m left to speculate: did they not accept the copy of my tax return (that listed both my spouse and my college student as dependents — i.e., they wanted a separate copy for the college student)? or perhaps they did not like the electronic proof of enrollment that I obtained from her college?
My spouse says it’s typical of insurance companies — some kind of automatic rejection, and then expect the runaround from poor call-in employees who simply have a checklist to go through but very little independent authority to provide useful information.
Okay, mea culpa to Secovia’s call center. Pleasantly surprised by friendly and efficient service (also liked result). Apparently dependent away at a mainland college was verified “as of December 27” so the initial letter must have been sent while the documentation was under further review (someone must have dropped a review flag). I’d been concerned since the call center was closed on Christmas day and then too busy yesterday to take my call. . . .
But now the question is with California raising tuition, should I bring her home?
Guys, the letter is a scam! Did you look at the State of Hawaii seal? It’s pixelated. Health benefits for your state emplyee account are provided to you by your Department’s personnel officer and handled internally with the State. There are no instances where you should provide your full SSN, only the last four digits.