Insurance company withdraws from Hawaii health exchange

Hawaii Health insurance company

The largest provider in the state has now announced that it is pulling out of the troubled marketplace.

The struggling Hawaii Health Connector has now experienced yet another setback, as the largest insurance company in the state has revealed that it will not be remaining within the exchange for individuals or small businesses.

The Hawaii Medical Service Association (HMSA) will not be offering its plans to consumers for 2015 coverage.

The insurance company announced that it has decided to cut off the small business plans that were going to be offered through the Hawaii exchange’s Small Business Health Options Program (SHOP). This means that when January comes around, there will be only a single health insurer from brokers will be able to sell plans to small business owners, which is Kaiser Permanente.

The insurance company said that its decision was based on the condition of the Hawaii Health Connector.

Hawaii Health care reform Insurance companyThat insurance exchange has been the center of some of the most disastrous technical problems since it first rolled out in November of last year. The HMSA explained that it was forced to spend almost 8,000 hours on working to overcome some of the tech issues that were caused by the Hawaii Health Connector, working all of its employees to the limit, and draining any chance that it had of making meaningful profits.

In fact, the HMSA financial reports from the first quarter of 2014 showed that the insurer had lost $30 million during those three months, alone. It acquired a debt of $8.4 million as a result of the struggle it faced in dealing with the problems linked with selling over the health insurance exchange.

According to Floyd Takeuchi, a spokesperson for the insurance company, “HMSA supported the Hawaii Health Connector in its development stage and at its launch last October. But it soon became evident that the Hawaii Health Connector’s technical challenges were so great that they severely impacted the public’s ability to use the site.” He also pointed out that there was no resolution to the technical problems and the site is still struggling with some problems that have never been repaired.

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