Frustrated consumers aren't the only ones with complaints aboutHealthCare.gov.

Exchange officials are trying to deal with a whole slew ofcontinuing complaints from carriers about the flawed health carewebsite.

Plan management concerns surface in a large batch ofHealthCare.gov "warroom" notes posted earlier this week by the HouseOversight and Government Reform Committee.

Aetna — a major exchange plan provider — tried to get somehigh-level attention from exchange managers Oct. 4 by sending ane-mail to plan account managers — not the HealthCare.gov helpdesk —listing at least 18 issues that the helpdesk had not addressed.

"One of their complaints was an inability to reach thehelpdesk," according to members of the HealthCare.gov team.

The Oversight Committee included the memo containing thatcomment in a collection of notes created from Oct. 1,when the HealthCare.gov enrollment system opened to the public,through Oct. 29.

Some of the notes in the collection came from a "war room" forthe entire Center for Consumer Information & InsuranceOversight — the arm of the U.S. Department of Health and HumanServices responsible for overseeing the entire PPACA exchangeprogram and managing the day-to-day operations of 36 HHS-runexchanges.

Other notes came from a war room created especially for the teamin charge of "qualified health plans" — the commercial insuranceplans that carriers are trying to sell through the exchanges.

The federal exchange carriers have a contract that limits whatthey can say about exchange activity and exchange problems,according to press reports. Few have given many details about theirexperiences with the exchange system.

In a summary of the e-mail Aetna sent on Oct. 4, the QHP warroom team noted that Aetna, for example, already had tried to gethelp from the HealthCare.gov helpdesk but wanted accountmanagers to coordinate resolution of their complaints.

Team members reported that they had beenforwarding that kind of plan issuer e-mail back to theHealthCare.gov helpdesk, but they decided that they also needed totell higher level managers — "Sheila and Kirk"— about complaintsfrom companies like Aetna.

The team also decided that two other staffers — "Mike andAlissa" — should help decide how to prioritize QHP issuercomplaints.

A few days later, on Oct. 8, managers at Horizon, a largeNew Jersey carrier, sent in a ticket saying "they saw so manyerrors that they couldn't even put it all in a ticket."

MetLife reported that it had submitted a ticket for dentalplan information errors back in August and still hadn't heard fromanyone on the HealthCare.gov team.

The QHP war room team delegated "Doug S" to see if hecould help Horizon improve the way it was submitting information,and it had "Lourdes" talk to MetLife.

Another team member, "Dora," talked to MetLife a weeklater and found there might have been a misunderstanding about howMetLife had submitted dental plan data for some states, includingGeorgia.

See also:

• CCIIO turning to paper apps in enrollment
• Inside the HealthCare.gov war room
• HealthCare.gov war room exposed problems