{"id":2965,"date":"2015-12-21T09:00:34","date_gmt":"2015-12-21T17:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/evergreensmallbusiness.com\/?p=2965"},"modified":"2015-12-28T09:36:53","modified_gmt":"2015-12-28T17:36:53","slug":"inside-tips-for-wa-small-business-owners-using-the-shop-exchange","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/evergreensmallbusiness.com\/inside-tips-for-wa-small-business-owners-using-the-shop-exchange\/","title":{"rendered":"Inside Tips for WA Small-Business Owners Using the SHOP Exchange"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Health<\/a>
Health insurance search on a computer<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This is the time of year when small business owners\u00a0often need to work with the Washington State SHOP Exchange. For this reason, I thought it’d make sense to share some tips for making the process easier and less taxing.<\/p>\n

Tip #1: Use a different email address for each WA Healthplanfinder account<\/h2>\n

For account security reasons, WA Healthplanfinder\u2019s system has been designed to require each account to use a different email address. It makes sense that the exchange does things this way, but it\u2019s also something that could make working with the site difficult for small-business owners if they\u2019re not already aware of it.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s an example of how to use this tip in practice. If you, the business owner, are also an employee (which you should be if you\u2019re an S corporation officer), then you should use a different email address for the business\u2019s SHOP account and your account as an individual employee.<\/p>\n

Another example: if an employee already has an individual account with WA Healthplanfinder, then the email address you provide for the employee on your roster should be different than the one the employee used to create his or her\u00a0own individual account.<\/p>\n

Tip #2: Never, ever, under any circumstances let your employees click \u201cUse Your Existing Account\u201d<\/h2>\n

Once you sign up for WA Healthplanfinder\u2019s SHOP exchange, you\u2019ll send an email out to your employees inviting them to sign up for coverage on your plan. The email your employees receive will include a link they can click that will bring them to the WA Healthplanfinder website so they can sign up for the plan.<\/p>\n

The first screen your employees see will prompt them to provide some information confirming their identity. Next, they\u2019ll be prompted to create an employee account with the Healthplanfinder.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the tricky part, though. If the employee already has an existing individual account with WA Healthplanfinder, the screen will ask the employee if he or she\u00a0wants to create a new employee account or use the existing account to manage his or her\u00a0employee health benefits. As of this writing, if an employee clicks the \u201cUse Your Existing Account\u201d button, the site won\u2019t work. The employee will just be taken to an Oracle error page and\u00a0can\u2019t do anything else.<\/p>\n

We know, your first question is probably, \u201cIf clicking that button breaks their site, why is it even there?\u201d To which we say, those are the sorts of questions only God knows the answer to. And possibly some programmers at Deloitte. But we don\u2019t have those guys\u2019 phone numbers.<\/p>\n

Tip #3: SHOP Customer Support often doesn\u2019t know what they\u2019re talking about<\/h2>\n

Don\u2019t get me wrong; some of the people working at WA Healthplanfinder\u2019s customer support have been fantastic. But in my experience, the level of expertise among the support staff has been a mixed bag.<\/p>\n

For example,\u00a0here\u2019s an interesting little anecdote. When I, as an employee of the CPA firm, first tried to sign up for coverage through WA Healthplanfinder, I made the fatal mistake of clicking the \u201cUse Your Existing Account\u201d button. I then called their customer support to figure out what was wrong.<\/p>\n

After going through\u00a0two very confused support representatives, I was told that I needed to dis-enroll from my current individual health plan before I could sign up for my employer\u2019s health plan. That made little sense to me at the time; there wasn\u2019t any overlap between the enrollment dates for my old individual plan and my new employer-provided plan, so why should there be a problem? Later I found out that this advice I received from SHOP Customer Support wasn\u2019t even correct. The real solution was to just create a second account for myself, as I described above in Tip #2.<\/p>\n

Customer Support should have known this, but instead I had to learn about it from Mike Jackling, who seems to be one of the few people at the SHOP exchange who knows what he\u2019s talking about. Mike is one of their business outreach representatives<\/a>. (For what it\u2019s worth, Mike\u2019s a pretty cool guy, and he helped our firm out a lot as we tried to figure out how to work with the exchange.)<\/p>\n

Tip #4: If you want WA Healthplanfinder to fix something about the website, attend a board meeting and make a stink about it<\/h2>\n

Here\u2019s our short wish list of improvements we\u2019d like to see:<\/p>\n