State Exchange Looking to Bypass Federal Hub

Connecticut's health insurance marketplace is trying to find a way to work around using a federal hub to help verify applicants for Medicaid and private insurance subsidies.

But as of Wednesday, Access Health CT's CEO Kevin Counihan said the marketplace remains dependent on the data center, which experienced outages in recent days.

Connecticut is one of 15 states that operate state health exchanges. It was still able to have consumers create accounts and shop anonymously for pricing comparisons on the Access Health CT website during the outage.

During a conference call on Wednesday, Counihan also said the website has experienced five hacking attempts. Two were from a foreign country and were referred to the National Security Agency.

Counihan said each attempt was unsuccessful and a security specialist is keeping tabs.