PROVIDENCE – Olga Bravo, co-owner of Olga’s Cup + Saucer, is no longer the smiling cover woman at the HealthSourceRI website, but she’s still determined to navigate the site and help her new manager, Evan McKay, find an affordable health insurance plan with benefits from her café.

With the holiday season fast approaching, however, it’s been difficult for Bravo and McKay to find the time to sit down and figure out what will work best. “I’ve got too many balls in the air,” Bravo told ConvergenceRI, who is also teaching at Johnson & Wales University this semester. The Thanksgiving 2013 order form now adorns the top of the café’s display case.

When Bravo and McKay do find time to engage with HealthSourceRI, they will discover that the contact center has been reorganized to create a new team – including brokers – to assist small businesses when they call or log in to sign up for health insurance, according to HealthSourceRI Executive Director Christine Ferguson.

The new team approach has not yet been publicized, and even spokeswoman Dara Chadwick was unfamiliar with it.

On Thursday, Nov. 14, the same day that a contrite President Barack Obama admitted that he had made two fumbles in the big game of health care reform, supporters of Rhode Island’s health insurance benefits exchange gathered at the Statehouse as a way to encourage them to continue to get the word to Rhode Islanders.

The reception, held in the Governor’s State Room, featured Gov. Lincoln D. Chafee, Lt. Gov. Elizabeth H. Roberts, Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce Providence President Laurie White, and Ferguson.

Number two – and trying harder
Chafee cited a New York Times article that showed Rhode Island as the number-two state in terms of the percent of first month’s target reached as of Nov. 2, at 142 percent. Connecticut was first with 191 percent of the first month’s target reached.

“We are used to being at the bottom of the pack, so we need to take a moment and recognize that we are in the front,” Roberts said, following Chafee to the dais. “This is a team effort.”

Roberts exhorted the supporters not to forget the overall goals of the new health benefits exchange. “What we’re talking about here is the health and well-being of Rhode Island. It’s a financial issue, it’s an economic issues, but it’s also about the daily lives of Rhode Islanders.”

Roberts recited the statistics – 117,000 unique website visits, 14,000 accounts created – comparing buying health insurance to buying a car. “You don’t buy a car in 10 minutes; you think about it, you go back; that’s what people are doing.”

One of the biggest challenges, she continued, “is that when people see the national news, they think that’s Rhode Island.”

White thanked the elected officials for their leadership in choosing to steer an independent course and not become part of the federal system. “We can see the wisdom of that decision today,” she said, adding that all you needed to do was watch any news broadcast.

White also praised the way in which the new exchange has worked in partnership with the employer community and the insurance broker community. “The full employee choice plan offers competitive plans with customizable options, so employees can buy up or buy down, depending on their specific needs. The website is seamless, it’s easy to navigate, you can look at the plans side by side, and it offers flexibility in pricing.”

The most important feature of the new exchange, White continued, is that it offers an attractive message to businesses that are looking to locate in Rhode Island. “Rhode Island now offers a degree of predictability for businesses for health plans and pricing,” she said. “It reaffirms that Rhode Island is a leader in so many respects and health care is one of them.”

Ferguson said that she was not satisfied in being number two, that she was very competitive in nature, and she said she had told her employees that she wanted Rhode island to be number one.

Cutting parents from RIteCare
The next big challenge facing HealthSourceRI will be transitioning more than 6,000 parents who had been receiving health insurance under the state Medicaid’s RIte Care plan to new insurance plans on the exchange.

The decision to remove the parents from RIte Care, recommended by Steven Costantino, secretary of the R.I. Executive Office of Health and Human Services, as a cost-saving measure, was approved by the R.I. General Assembly. The children will remain enrolled in RIteCare, but the parents will now have to shop for health insurance on the exchange. Letters were sent to the parents this week notifying them of the change, and HealthSourceRI has said that they will follow up with phone calls to each individual parent.

Although the plan is expected to “save” money from the state budget on paper, it remains to be seen whether the expected savings can be achieved if the parents don’t sign up for insurance.