The federal data services hub was down again Tuesday night. It’s the second failure since Sunday morning for the database that Connecticut’s insurance exchange needs to communicate with in order to complete health insurance applications.
Access Health CT, which manages Connecticut’s exchange, was informed of the outage on Tuesday evening but did not have any information about whether the failure was connected to Terremark — the Verizon networking company responsible for Sunday’s outage.
“As a result, consumers will not be able to complete the sign-up process for Medicaid or Advanced Premium Tax Credit determinations,” Kathleen Tallarita, a spokeswoman for Access Health CT, said in a statement. “Connecticut consumers can continue to create accounts as well as shop anonymously for pricing comparisons.”
The announcement of the outage comes hours before U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is expected to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee about the difficulties related to the federal website.
Access Health CT CEO Kevin Counihan also is expected to offer an update on Connecticut’s exchange Wednesday afternoon.
The exchange is no longer putting out daily enrollment numbers. Between Oct. 1 and Oct. 15 more than 3,847 people had signed up for plans through the exchange. About half of those individuals, or 1,857, qualified for Medicaid.
