The Washington Times reported yesterday that ACS/Xerox is being sued in a class action by Nevada residents who purchased health insurance from the state health insurance exchange that was set up by the company. The state government contracted with ACS/Xerox to set up the exchange to comply with the Affordable Care Act and was paid more than $70 million to do so. ACS/Xerox also operates in Texas as the state’s private Medicaid claims administrator and is being sued for alleged faulty Medicaid orthodontic pre-approvals by Texas dentists.
The Nevada ACS/Xerox web health insurance portal, the Nevada Health Link, had problems, like the federal web portal as well as those of other states, during the open enrollment season from Oct. 1 to March 31.
The suit alleges that thousands of residents in Nevada purchased and paid for health care insurance but technical glitches in the ACS/Xerox system prevented them from being registered properly and covered, thereby unknowingly leaving them on the hook for their medical fees. One plaintiff now owes over $400,000 for major heart surgery that he thought was covered.
To quote the Times:
Other states that opted to set up their own private insurance markets — including Oregon, Maryland, Massachusetts, Vermont — have withheld payments, renegotiated contracts or threatened to sue their web vendors over faulty exchanges, but a civil complaint filed this month in Clark County, Nev., says residents were left in the lurch because both entities failed to deliver.
“The [Nevada state exchange} and Xerox have utterly failed to create a system that works as advertised, and as a result, thousands of Nevadans remain uninsured despite payment of insurance premiums,” the lawsuit by Las Vegas attorney Matthew Q. Callister contends.
Read the whole story from the Times