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 From morning until midnight, clerks here type up the names, Social
Security numbers and other personal details of those who have filled
out paper applications for health insurance under President Barack
Obama's Affordable Care Act.
From the outside, there's no indication that the workers in the
three-story brick building are carrying out an increasingly crucial
part of the healthcare overhaul known as Obamacare.
But as the Obama administration tries to recover from the disastrous
debut of the website that is supposed to enroll millions of
Americans in health coverage, its call for frustrated Americans to
enroll the old-fashioned way — on paper — have made this building in
Rogers, Arkansas, one of the most important cogs in the president's
signature domestic achievement.
The White House still plans for most uninsured and under-insured
Americans to sign up on the HealthCare.gov website, but it estimates
that about 1 in 3 applications — as many as 6 million by the end of
March — will be done on paper.
As of the end of November, consumers had submitted about 230,000
paper applications, about 20 percent of the total, the U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services said on Wednesday.
AN EXPENSIVE TASK
It isn't cheap to process all that paper.
Through the end of October, the administration had agreed to pay
$202 million to Serco, the international conglomerate that handles
the documents for the 36 states that have not set up their own
insurance exchanges. That was more than the $174 million the
government had spent on the website at that point.
By the time the contract expires in 2018, the U.S. government could
pay Serco as much as $1.2 billion — nearly twice what it expects to
eventually spend on the website.
For Rogers and three other small cities in the middle of the United
States, that spending has an upside.
Since the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services(CMS)
awarded Serco the Obamacare contract in July, the company has
created more than 3,000 clerical and data-entry jobs in small cities
where an office job that pays $10 to $13 an hour with limited
benefits is considered a livable wage.
The company ultimately could hire up to 10,000 people for the work,
a company spokesman told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in October.
THE PAPER PROCESS
Serco has set up four facilities to handle paper applications for
Obamacare coverage. Paper forms are mailed to a facility in London,
Kentucky, where they are converted to an electronic format and sent
to offices in Wentzville, Missouri, Lawton, Oklahoma, and Rogers, a
city of 57,000 in northwest Arkansas.
Workers at those sites enter information from the scanned images
into the same computer system that underpins HealthCare.gov, to
verify applicants' identity and determine whether they are eligible
for government subsidies to help them pay for coverage.
The Serco workers undergo a background check and are not allowed to
access the Internet or use mobile phones while on the job as part of
an effort to protect consumer privacy, CMS said.
In a matter of months, Serco has become one of the biggest employers
in a thriving economy in the Rogers area that is anchored by the
corporate headquarters of Wal-Mart Stores Inc., JB Hunt Transport
Services and Tyson Foods.
Serco hired about 600 workers in Rogers in August and brought on
another 1,000 at the end of October, according to local officials.
"There's a lot of people who are going to have a better Christmas
this year because Serco located in northwest Arkansas," said Michael
Harvey, chief operating officer of the Northwest Arkansas Council, a
business-development group.
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Serco keeps a low profile in Rogers.
There's no logo in front of the building that houses its operations,
though security guards are quick to intercept visitors to the
property. Employees smoking cigarettes at the edge of the parking
lot on a recent day said they have been told not to speak to the
media. A company spokesman did not respond to several requests for
comment.
BUILDING ON PROSPERITY
Rogers isn't necessarily desperate for jobs.
New hotels, shopping centers and gated developments attest to the
prosperity that has come with Wal-Mart's explosive growth. The
unemployment rate in Rogers was 5.4 percent in August, nearly two
percentage points below the national figure. Local officials say the
2007-2009 recession felt more like a pause in the long boom that has
more than doubled the region's population since 1990.
Nevertheless, officials say Serco has filled an important gap by
providing jobs for lower-skilled workers who had been relegated to
minimum-wage jobs during the recession. They hope that the company
will use the facility for other jobs once the Affordable Care Act
work slows down.
"I've talked to a number of different folks who've accepted jobs and
gone to work for Serco — they seem to be very happy," said Rogers
Mayor Greg Hines.
Though the company appears to be widely admired in Rogers, its
mission is less popular. Obama lost northwest Arkansas to Republican
Mitt Romney by 32 percent to 66 percent in the 2012 presidential
election, and many residents view Obamacare — which seeks to help
more than 30 million Americans with little or no insurance and sets
minimum standards for all types of coverage — as a costly experiment
in social engineering.
That has required the area's politicians, overwhelmingly Republican,
to balance their support for the economic benefits Obamacare has
brought to the area with their opposition to the Democratic
president's healthcare program.
"If America is going to continue to be placed under something as
flawed as the Affordable Care Act, then at least if there are going
to be jobs created by it, let's put some of those jobs in northwest
Arkansas," said Republican Representative Steve Womack, who was
mayor of Rogers before he ran for Congress.
Arkansas state Senator Bart Hester says he believes that Obamacare
will saddle future generations with debt, but that it also has led
at least one new Serco worker to move into an apartment building he
owns in the Rogers area.
"The rental market's very good here. If you have 1,500 people moving
to town it's only going to get better," Hester said. "You won't see
me on Twitter bashing Serco."
(Editing by David Lindsey and Kenneth Barry)
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