OPM extends postal open season enrollment and beefs up customer service

The Office of Personnel Management has extended its open season enrollment deadline until late Friday and added more customer experience support for the new health insurance exchange meant to support 1.9 million eligible postal employees, annuitants, and their families. 

OPM officials said in a statement released on Dec. 5 that they wanted to provide enrollees in the newly created Postal Service Health Benefits Program more opportunity to select or change their coverage plans during the exchange’s first open season, extending the original deadline of Monday until this Friday at 11:59 p.m. 

“This is a big change for these customers. We feel it is important to extend Open Season for customers of the PSHB Program to give them ample time to shop for plans and change their elections if they want to,” OPM officials said in a statement. 

The PSHB program, established by the 2022 Postal Service Reform Act, will provide USPS employees, retirees and dependents with their own health insurance exchange in 2025 and officially move them off of the larger Federal Employees Health Benefit Program.

Because the exchange is new and in its first open season, officials expected a surge custom experience requests and developed a network of federal partners and at least one contractor to manage the in-flow of requests. 

But OPM’s inspector general said in October that while the plan was “robust,” it did not offer comprehensive policies and procedures outlining how everything would operate.

The watchdog offered one recommendation at the time, calling on OPM to document comprehensive plans outlining the roles and responsibilities of all partners involved in customer experience operations for PSHB. 

OPM officials agreed with the overall recommendation and said in that they had “focused extensive efforts on data integration and have stood up both a cross-functional data tiger team and an enrollment reconciliation team” to help resolve coverage-related issues quickly.

In the statement announcing the deadline extension, OPM officials said the enrollment system has been working well and had no unplanned outages, but also noted that they were adding more customer experience resources to help handle high demand to the PSHB Helpline.

Those resources include more call line staff, an option for individuals to receive a call back from a customer service representative, new information on the call line for customer self-service options, streamlined call center routing and an additional verification option through Login.gov.

OPM has coordinated its customer experience efforts through its Retirement Services office as well as the General Services Administration, the Labor Department, the Agriculture Department’s National Finance Center, the Postal Service Human Resource Shared Service Center and its customer support contractor, Maximus. 

Through OPM’s Healthcare and Insurance Office, Maximus is contracted to provide a helpline for PSHB customers, support portal navigation assistance, respond to basic PSHBP questions and troubleshoot technical issues, while also providing enrollment to certain beneficiaries. 

GSA utilized its login.gov team to help provide account access, while the Labor Department, National Finance Center and the Postal Service Human Resource Shared Service Center were also tapped to provide customer support services. 

OPM officials noted that the PSHB exchange continues to receive “high engagement from customers” and because of the new processes for enrollees, the agency wanted to provide them more time and resources to help make their health care plan decisions. 

The agency also noted that while the extension will not affect benefits coverage, which is set to start on Jan.1, it cautioned PSHB enrollees not to wait until the last minute to make their selections.