Free Republic

Last month, while Minnesota's new health insurance exchange site was scrambling to fix glitches and under fire from critics, its director was on vacation. MNsure director April Todd-Malmlov took a two-week vacation to Costa Rica around Thanksgiving. Gov. Mark Dayton defended her right to take a pre-scheduled trip, but critics of the fledgling health insurance exchange pounced. The conservative group Watchdog.org put out a press release Thursday, condemning her absence while "thousands of frustrated Minnesotans were notified about glitches and errors in their applications on the state insurance exchange."

Time to test Minnesota Nice to destruction, I guess: …Minnesota’s top insurers have laid out a list of technological problems that they say may keep people who’ve enrolled in a health plan from being covered on Jan. 1. Insurance carriers selling plans on the state’s insurance marketplace say enrollment information they’re getting from MNsure, is inaccurate and incomplete – and that time is running out to fix these problems. [snip] “At this late date, the health plan companies do not have most of the names or information on individuals who have enrolled through MNsure,” Julie Brunner, executive director of the...

MNSure, the state's health care exchange, is vulnerable to a specific kind of WiFi attack. We discovered this vulnerability during a simulated attack we ran recently. MNSure denies it has a problem and blames users. 5 Eyewitness News wanted to see how MNSure compares with other state-run health care exchanges. It's why we partnered with Mark Lanterman at Computer Forensic Services to test at least a dozen other exchange sites. More than 41% of the sites tested passed, meaning they are not vulnerable to the type of WiFi attack we simulated. Like MNSure, more than 58% failed the test

Minnesota health insurers say they still aren't getting complete information about enrollees in MNsure, the state's health insurance exchange, and the delays could prevent people from having coverage Jan. 1. Data being sent to the health plans contain inaccuracies, omissions and in some cases conflicting information about which policy an enrollee is selecting, according to a letter sent to state officials Friday by Julie Brunner, executive director of the Minnesota Council of Health Plans, a trade group. Insurers also say time is growing short to manually fix the problems -- particularly with an expected surge

Health insurance premiums for 2014 are so low in many parts of Minnesota that some consumers aren't qualifying for tax credits through the state's new health insurance exchange. Access to tax credits has been widely cited as a key reason for shopping on MNsure -- the new government-run health insurance website -- so some consumers have been confused by the vanishing subsidies, April Todd-Malmlov, the MNsure executive director, said during a board meeting Wednesday in St. Paul. Paraphrasing a common question asked at MNsure's call center, Todd-Malmlov said: "I think there's something wrong with the system -- I'm supposed to...

States running their own insurance programs as part of the Affordable Care Act have marketing and enrollment strategies that are sidestepping references to the words “ObamaCare,” a term that has largely come to be associated with the unpopularity of the plan. In Minnesota, state employees are promoting their health insurance marketplace as MNsure -- even going to the annual state fair to hand out fans imprinted with pictures of Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox, according to The Wall Street Journal. The grassroots effort is part of a larger, $9 million marketing effort that includes billboards and TV ads.