A putative class action lawsuit in Nevada alleges negligence and other claims against the private contractor hired to create the state’s health insurance exchange. At least two plaintiffs found themselves without insurance coverage, despite paying premiums since last fall. Their attorney says around forty more people have contacted him with similar complaints, and as many as 10,500 could have been affected.

As the people involved in the suit have repeatedly made clear, the lawsuit is about the alleged negligence, etc., of a private contractor, not about the Affordable Care Act (“ACA,” also known as Obamacare). Has that stopped the right-wing media from calling this a lawsuit over Obamacare? Do you even need to ask that question? More on that later.

The state of Nevada hired Xerox to create the state’s health insurance exchange, Nevada Health Link, in accordance with the ACA. A glitch caused some people who signed up through the state exchange to not actually have insurance. The lead plaintiff signed up in November and made his first premium payment on November 21. When he needed triple-bypass surgery in January, however, the insurer Health Plan of Nevada (HPN) had no record of him. The exchange and Xerox had allegedly been sending his payments to Nevada Health CO-OP, a different insurer. Neither insurer had a record of coverage, so the man ended up incurring over $400,000 in medical bills for himself. (On the plus side, he wasn’t left to die.)

HPN agreed in March to provide the man with retroactive coverage going back to January 1, 2014, which includes his surgery. The company had nothing nice to say about the state’s exchange, or the private company hired to run it:

“We understand that there was an error by the administrator of the exchange in processing Mr. Basich’s enrollment that was not known to us and he was enrolled with another carrier,” Health Plan of Nevada’s statement said.

Because of that mix-up, company executives had stern words for Xerox at Thursday’s exchange’s board session.

Kyle Clingo, senior vice president of operations for Health Plan parent UnitedHealthcare of Nevada, said the company is “exploring and reserving all legal remedies against the parties responsible for this unfortunate situation.”

He also said Health Plan of Nevada, the state’s biggest insurer and one of just four carriers on Nevada Health Link, would have to “rethink” its commitment to the exchange “if real changes cannot be made” in the system’s functionality. The exchange has enrolled about 20 percent of its forecast 118,000 members, and many consumers have complained of problems verifying coverage.

The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Nevada on April 1, 2014:

A Las Vegas man who had trouble getting coverage through the state exchange’s Nevada Health Link website is a co-plaintiff in the first class action lawsuit filed over the troubled insurance marketplace.

Local personal-injury law firm Callister &Associates filed the lawsuit on behalf of Larry Basich, who went uncovered even after paying premiums as far back as November, and a local woman named Lea Swartley, who also has gone without coverage despite paying for a plan and was due to give birth Tuesday night.

The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court of Nevada on Tuesday afternoon against the state of Nevada, Xerox and the Silver State Health Insurance Exchange, which runs Nevada Health Link.

Matthew Callister said about 40 people have called him to say they’ve paid for coverage and have no insurance.

At this point, you might be thinking that this lawsuit really is about the ACA. I suppose you could say that if the ACA wasn’t around, there never would have been a state exchange, and therefore no opportunity for this glitch to occur. That would be completely missing the point, though, as the plaintiffs’ attorney explains:

Callister added that the lawsuit is not an indictment of the Affordable Care Act, which authorized insurance exchanges, or of the state exchange’s insurance plans.

“This has nothing to do with the ACA. This is 100 percent about Xerox, who won the bid from the state of Nevada to create this exchange. And they’ve failed. They absolutely failed,” Callister said.

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Callister said the lawsuit alleges gross negligence and failure to do due diligence to determine whether Xerox could handle the job of building the exchange.

This is not about the government not being up to a task. The allegation here is that the private corporation hired to do the job wasn’t up to the task. If the government made a mistake, according to the lawsuit, it was in making a bad hiring decision.

That didn’t stop World Net Daily from making it look like this is a lawsuit against all of Obamacare or something. The headline ominously declares “OBAMACARE: 1ST CLASS-ACTION LAWSUIT FILED.” This wasn’t an original article by WND, but rather an aggregation that only shows the first three paragraphs.

Most aggregators only show partial content, but this shows just enough to constitute a sinister assertion for those already inclined to believe the worst. If you click through to the full Las Vegas Review Journal article, you’ll see the lawyer’s “this is not about the ACA” quote, but I suspect WND knows most of its readers won’t do that. (A quick perusal of the comments confirms that.)

WND wasn’t alone, of course, in laying the blame for this entirely at Obama[care]’s feet:

• Fox News, March 18, 2014: Vegas man stuck with $407,000 medical bill after ObamaCare breakdown
• The Blaze, March 18, 2014: Las Vegas Man Says Obamacare Disaster Left Him on the Hook for $400K+ in Medical Bills
• Breitbart.com, March 18, 2014: Obamacare Glitch Sticks Las Vegas Man with $407,000 Doctor Bill
• Red Alert Politics, March 18, 2014: Obamacare hiccup leaves heart attack sufferer with no coverage and $407,000 in bills
• Townhall.com, March 19, 2014: Brutal: Nevada Man Stuck with $407,000 Obamacare Bill
• New York Post, March 19, 2014: Vegas resident hit with $460K ObamaCare ‘glitch’ [Ed. note: Where did the extra $53,000 come from?]

At least one watchdog caught on to this:

• Media Matters for America, March 20, 2014: Las Vegas Review-Journal Uses Single Anecdote To Claim Obamacare A Failure

There’s at least one way to see all of this as a success story, based on the facts that are available through the media. An allegedly major administrative screw-up resulted in a man going without health insurance coverage at a time when he needed a serious surgical procedure costing over $400,000. Despite having no insurance and (presumably) insufficient liquid assets to pay out-of-pocket, he was able to get the surgery anyway. Afterwards, the insurance company that he thought was covering him agreed to pay for the surgery.

Would any of this have happened in the absence of the ACA? Maybe this particular guy would have had different insurance, but others surely would have died for lack of the ability to pay for such surgery. I cannot begin to imagine how torturous this experience must have been for the plaintiff, but it is almost a daily experience for others in this country. Furthermore, the system may have screwed up this situation, but the system fixed it. And by “the system,” to be clear, I mean the one created by the ACA.

Photo credit: By Kurykh (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.