– U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill signed herself up on the health care exchange this week, and did so, she said, almost “seamlessly.”
McCaskill’s office distributed a video on Friday showing the Democratic lawmaker at her desk in Washington going step-by-step through the process on HealthCare.gov.
“This was as simple and seamless, frankly, as many websites are that do commerce,” she remarked, after spending what she said was about 45 minutes signing up for her plan. “I think this is a huge improvement over when I first began trying to click around this website.”
McCaskill said she was able to save a great deal of time during the sign up process by shopping around for her plan before going to the website to sign up. Her only ‘glitch,’ she joked, was forgetting her username, which she said stalled her enrollment an extra 20 minutes.
“I knew that I wanted to limit my deductible to less than $2,000, and my out of pocket max to $5,000, and wanted to try to keep my premium around $500 a month,” she said. “This plan will cost 552.62 a month.”
With something of a symbolic wink, perhaps, to critics of putting the information online, McCaskill said as an aside at one point, “now they want my Social Security number. Since the government gave it to me in the first place, I’ve got no problem repeating it back to them.”
McCaskill’s enrollment comes months after the botched initial rollout of the online federal marketplace. In October, during the website’s first month in operation, some 800 Missourians signed up for health care plans – compared to more than 4,100 in November. More than 31,000 applications have been completed, covering nearly 63,000 people. Missourians enrolling in a plan must use the federal marketplace because the state has opted out of establishing its own.
McCaskill and other members of Congress are required to sign up in the health care exchange. Members and their staffs are the given an employer contribution by the federal government, which McCaskill said she declined. The office of Sen. Roy Blunt said the Missouri Republican will donate an equal amount to his employer contribution to charity.