Consumers Start Using Coverage Under Health Law

“I’ve had some heart palpitations, and my mom’s side has a history of heart problems starting early,” she said Wednesday in a telephone interview. “So it’s mostly just to double-check that everything is O.K.”

Ms. Hornbach, who has had breast cancer and retired early from the technology industry, said that insurance companies in Arizona had refused to cover her until about two years ago, when she got a policy with monthly premiums of $285 and a deductible of $5,500 a year. Last month, using the federal insurance exchange, she bought a midlevel silver plan with lower premiums and deductible.

“It’s a better policy — lower out-of-pocket, more choice of doctors,” she said. “This is a very happy day.”

Consumers around the country began using coverage provided by the new health care law on Wednesday, the same day that Medicaid expanded to hundreds of thousands of people in about half the states. Many provisions of the 2010 health care law offering new benefits and protections to consumers, including those with pre-existing conditions, also took effect.

Hospitals said they were getting ready for an influx of newly insured patients, but many health care providers said the pace was slower than usual because of the New Year’s holiday. In a typical report, Clay Holtzman, a spokesman for Swedish Medical Center in Seattle, said the system’s hospitals were not seeing an immediate surge.

“We might at some point down the road, since we have spent a lot of time informing uninsured patients of their options under the exchange and expanded Medicaid,” Mr. Holtzman said in an email. “But it depends on if those patients chose plans that include us.”

Swedish is one of the largest hospital systems in the region, but Mr. Holtzman said it had been excluded from the networks of providers used by the two largest health plans on the state’s insurance exchange.

Some people using their new insurance discovered that they could be responsible for substantial co-payments and other out-of-pocket costs.

Nancy M. Schlichting, the chief executive of the Henry Ford Health System in Detroit, said that one patient who visited the emergency room of the system’s flagship hospital on Wednesday tried to fill a prescription and found that the co-payment would be $84 — more than she was accustomed to paying. She got a similar drug with a lower co-payment, illustrating the need for patients to pay close attention to details of their drug coverage, Ms. Schlichting said.

In San Antonio, at a 24-hour Walgreens store, only a few vehicles were lined up at the drive-through window at midday, and no one was waiting in line to pick up prescriptions at the indoor pharmacy counter.

“It’s dead,” said Leslie Castillo, a pharmacist on duty. “We’ve had a few regulars come by, but no one has come in today with a new insurance card or wanting us to look up their benefits under Obamacare.”

One reason, Ms. Castillo said, was that most doctors were not seeing patients on the New Year’s holiday. But she added, “We’ll probably be packed tomorrow.”

Kenneth E. Raske, the president of the Greater New York Hospital Association, said: “Today is a historic occasion for the health care community. The coverage expansion kicks in for hundreds of thousands of people in New York State and millions across the country, who will enjoy the comfort of knowing they won’t have to worry about health care bills if they get sick.”

Danny Cottrell, the owner of a pharmacy in Brewton, Ala., said he had helped several people sign up for coverage. One customer, who has $3,500 to $4,000 a year in prescription drug costs, qualified for federal subsidies and chose a plan with a premium of about $300 a month and an annual deductible of $500.

“He will definitely come out ahead,” Mr. Cottrell said. “He will save at least $7,500 a year on medical bills.”

Dr. Michael W. Cropp, the president of Independent Health, an insurer in Buffalo, said, “I anticipate a lot of uncertainty and confusion and some frustration” as consumers begin to use their new insurance policies.

“The website for the New York exchange is now working for most enrollment purposes,” Dr. Cropp said. “But I have concerns about how funds will flow from the federal government to health plans for members receiving federal subsidies.”

Expecting a continued battle over health care, the White House moved Wednesday to recruit volunteers for its campaign to defend and promote the law, which is likely to be a defining issue in many congressional races this year. A White House website invites supporters and beneficiaries of the law to provide their names, email addresses and personal experiences.

“Whether you have new coverage today or know someone who does, we want to hear your story,” David Simas, an aide to President Obama, said in an email to people who had expressed interest in the issue.

Jessica Santillo, a White House spokeswoman, said the invitation was part of a systematic new effort by the administration to “highlight stories of everyday Americans benefiting from the law.”

The administration hopes to encourage enrollment and reverse public opinion polls that show approval of the health care law lagging behind disapproval.

Lisa Maria Garza contributed reporting from San Antonio, and Kimiya Shokoohi from Los Angeles.

Your Money Adviser: Mobile Banks Gaining Popularity With Young Consumers

Then she heard about GoBank, one of a new breed of mobile banking services aiming at fee-averse customers, especially 20-somethings or “millennials,” accustomed to doing everything on their smartphones. She now uses it as her sole bank.

Ms. Goetze is a fan of a GoBank feature that lets her check her balance quickly on her phone, without having to log in to her account. “I love, love, love it!” she said. She doesn’t pay any monthly fee; GoBank lets users choose their fee (from zero to $9 a month), and right now she opts to pay nothing. But she said she may start paying $1 a month, now that she has been using GoBank for a while and likes it. She estimates she would have had to pay about $12 a month with a traditional account.

Old-fashioned banks, of course, also offer mobile banking apps, and branchless banks aren’t new either. But the upstarts, which include Simple and Moven, especially appeal to younger customers and others on a tight budget because they shun most fees, including dreaded overdraft fees, and have no minimum balance requirements. Each differs slightly in their offerings, but all aim to simplify payments and help users closely track their spending. They’re meant to be used when customers are on the fly, rather than sitting down at a computer.

The new alternatives work with traditional banks to hold deposits, so the money in your account is F.D.I.C.-insured. GoBank is the mobile banking arm of the Green Dot Corporation, which markets reloadable prepaid debit cards and owns Green Dot Bank, which holds the funds deposited via GoBank. Simple and Moven are in effect banking services, rather than banks, but they work with traditional banks to handle the actual banking functions behind their mobile apps. Simple’s deposits are held at Bancorp Bank, based in Delaware (a spokeswoman said Simple may also partner with other banks in the future as it grows), while Moven’s are held at CBW Bank, which is based in Kansas. But customers access the service through their mobile apps or websites.

The new mobile banks are gaining in popularity. Simple became available to the public in July 2012 and now has about 80,000 customers, said a spokeswoman, Krista Berlincourt. Simple currently requires users to email a request for an invitation to join, before allowing them to register. The approach acts as a fraud deterrent and also lets the company ramp up its systems to meet demand, she said.

Moven is still in its testing phase, and also asks customers to submit an invitation, said Alex Sion, Moven’s president; he says the service has “a couple of thousand” customers. One of its distinctions is that it offers users the option to make payments directly from their phone, by tapping the phone on a payment terminal, he said.

The new mobile models are evolving, but show promise by focusing on what the customer wants to do, rather than relying on banking terms that most millennials don’t care about, said Jennifer Tescher, chief executive of the Center for Financial Services Innovation. Simple’s users, for instance, can see their “safe to spend” balance, which takes into account pending bills. Young people like to have quick access to check their balances, she said, because they have been hard hit by the slow economy and are on tight budgets. “They care about having a terrific user experience that’s easy to use and understand, and works in real time,” she said.

Jim Bruene, founder of the Netbanker blog, said the new mobile banks had a “hip” aura that appeals to young people. GoBank, for instance, offers a budgeting tool called Fortune Teller. Users can ask whether a purchase for a certain amount is a good idea, and the system will respond based on your spending — usually with a mildly sarcastic remark (“Think. When did you last see your mind?”).

Email: yourmoneyadviser@nytimes.com

Disruptions: Microsoft’s Struggle to Make Things Simple for Consumers

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Advertising: Courting Thrifty Consumers With Value and Quality Brands Stress Value and Quality to Reach Thrifty Consumers

Many on Madison Avenue are deciding to focus on value, as in value for money, celebrating thriftiness as they did during the dark days of 2008 and 2009 but also, in an effort to keep ads from growing stale, suggesting that product attributes like quality matter, too, in a “you get what you pay for” fashion.

For example, advertising to be introduced on Monday by Vonage, the Internet phone provider, replaces its usual message of lower prices, expressed by exhortations like “Ditch the big bill,” with a theme, “Crazy generous,” voiced by a brand character styled as the company’s new chief generosity officer. “What we need is a company that connects us with generosity,” the character says in a commercial by JWT, part of WPP.

The new theme is “bigger than just saving money,” said Barbara Goodstein, chief marketing officer at Vonage Holdings in Holmdel, N.J.

“We believe people should have the opportunity to find value in technology,” she added, listing elements that, in addition to low cost, include “flexibility, simplicity, quality, new products and innovation.”

The “Crazy generous” theme is meant to convey that Vonage remains “committed to providing consumers with low-cost communications services,” Ms. Goodstein said, as part of “a business philosophy” embodied by the brand character.

“He is a champion of the people,” she added, in a populist way, which makes him “the right spokesperson for our times.”

Procter & Gamble, the nation’s largest advertiser by spending, has been scrambling to fine-tune its lineup of mostly premium-price household staples in categories like beauty, detergents and paper goods. The goal is to add lower-price items to appeal to shoppers who have been switching brands to save money but still seek efficacy from what they buy, while not eroding sales for the company’s higher-price merchandise.

The recent abrupt departure of the Procter & Gamble chief executive, Robert A. McDonald, who was succeeded by his predecessor, A. G. Lafley, was attributed partly to concerns the effort was hitting too many bumpy patches.

One example of how Procter has sought to adapt to the times was the return in January of Vidal Sassoon hair products, discontinued in North America in 2003, as what the company called the “affordable” Vidal Sassoon Pro Series line — i.e., priced lower than the company’s Pantene brand name hair products, but higher than store brands.

This June, Procter & Gamble plans to introduce Iams So Good, a dog food that will cost about 15 percent less than the Iams line, which is among the higher-price dog foods like Eukanuba and Hill’s. Iams So Good, aimed at brands like Beneful and Pedigree, is being introduced with advertising by the creative agency for Iams, Saatchi & Saatchi in New York, part of the Publicis Groupe, that includes commercials, print and online ads, displays in stores and content in social media. The budget for the Iams So Good campaign, which echoes the Iams brand’s ad theme, “Keep love strong,” is estimated at more than $50 million.

Making Iams “more accessible” is “a big move for us,” said Kristine Decker, marketing director for North America at the Procter & Gamble pet care division in Cincinnati.

“We’re broadening our appeal,” she added, because “we realize a lot of our brands need to ‘tier down’ to appeal to more consumers.” She compared adding Iams So Good as part of the Iams line to the way the company added lower-price Bounty Basic and Charmin Basic products to the premium-price Bounty and Charmin lines of paper goods.

As Iams So Good arrives in stores, Procter intends to “support regular Iams, too,” Ms. Decker said, because “we’ve got to build the base as we expand.” According to Kantar Media, a division of WPP, Procter spent $69.9 million to advertise Iams last year in major media, compared with $67.4 million in 2011. That could help deter defections to Iams So Good by buyers of Iams.

The campaign for Iams So Good promotes the absence of ingredients like added sugar, dyes and artificial preservatives and proclaims that the new variety “has 100 percent wholesome ingredients and nothing else.” The product’s lower cost will be conveyed through the store displays and packaging rather than brought up in commercials or print ads.

“We don’t talk about the value or the price,” said Tris Gates-Bonarius, global creative director on the Iams and Eukanuba brands at Saatchi & Saatchi, so “the look and feel of the campaign” can be in “the Iams tone of voice, celebrating authentic, real relationships between pets and owners.” For instance, she added, the commercials for Iams So Good will feature pets, rather than trained animals, that appear with their owners, just as commercials for Iams do. One spot for Iams So Good depicts a dog named Harvey performing what is described as his “ ‘I’m happy you’re home’ dance.”

Ms. Decker echoed Ms. Gates-Bonarius. “Our first priority is to create awareness of what’s in your dog’s bowl,” Ms. Decker said of the campaign’s emphasis on the ingredients in Iams So Good. “We will drive more overt value awareness in stores.”

Technophoria: For Consumers, an ‘Open Data’ Society Is a Misnomer

Consolidated Edison monitors my household’s energy consumption and provides a chart of monthly utility use. But when I sought more granular information, so I could learn which of my recharging devices gobbles up the most electricity, I found that Con Ed doesn’t automatically provide customers with data about hourly or even daily use. Robert McGee, a spokesman for Con Ed, suggested that I might go down to the basement once an hour and check the meter myself.

Then there is my health club, which keeps track of my visits through swipes of my membership card. Yet when I recently asked for an online log of those visits, I was offered a one-time printout for the year — if I were willing to wait a half-hour.

Never mind all the hoopla about the presumed benefits of an “open data” society. In our day-to-day lives, many of us are being kept in the data dark.

“The fact that I am producing data and companies are collecting it to monetize it, if I can’t get a copy myself, I do consider it unfair,” says Latanya Sweeney, the director of the Data Privacy Lab at Harvard, where she is a professor of government and technology.

Of course, she notes, we can replicate the information that companies collect and collate about us with third-party apps or other workarounds, but we shouldn’t have to resort to redundancy. Professor Sweeney says: “We would like to see people have access to all of the data that they produce.”

In fact, a few companies are challenging the norm of corporate data hoarding by actually sharing some information with the customers who generate it — and offering tools to put it to use. It’s a small but provocative trend in the United States, where only a handful of industries, like health care and credit, are required by federal law to provide people with access to their records.

Last year, San Diego Gas and Electric, a utility, introduced an online energy management program in which customers can view their electricity use in monthly, daily or hourly increments. There is even a practical benefit: customers can earn credits by reducing energy consumption during peak hours.

About one-quarter of the company’s 1.2 million residential customers have tried the program, says Caroline Winn, the company’s vice president for customer services. Newer features, she says, allow customers to download their own use files. Or they can choose to give permission for the utility to share their records directly with a handful of apps that can analyze the data and suggest ways to reduce energy consumption.

“The customer owns their data,” Ms. Winn says. “Whether they want to use our app or somebody else’s, we want to make sure we are facilitating that.”

(Con Ed in New York also offers customers reduced pricing if they use electricity during off-peak hours. But the program requires the installation of a special meter.)

People might feel more comfortable about being subject to data-mining if companies did a better job of demonstrating a direct benefit to them, argues Jules Polonetsky, director of the Future of Privacy Forum, an industry financed research organization in Washington. One model for this, he says, is the product recommendation engine at Amazon, which lets customers view their purchase histories and excise one-off items they bought for friends that might not represent their own personal tastes.

“They are providing transparency as a feature,” Mr. Polonetsky says. “I can tweak their algorithm in a way that is mutually useful.” (Amazon is one of the sponsors of his organization.)

Even so, companies rarely offer customers more than a cropped snapshot of their activities.

Right now, for example, fitness enthusiasts who use blood pressure monitors, calorie calculators and movement sensors typically can’t collate the data for a unified view of their wellness, Doc Searls, a technology writer who has experienced this kind of problem himself, told me. If people could easily integrate their data, he wrote in a recent blog post, they might be able to correlate weight loss to a particular workout routine or diet. Those companies that do allow customers to export their files and integrate their data elsewhere, he says, have a market advantage over companies that are data misers.

“Stock data, bank data, and bond data are all more valuable when they are looked at together,” says Mr. Searls, the author of “The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge.” “If I have a choice between apps and one of them shares the data that I can use more easily, I am going to choose that one.”

INTEL, for instance, recently introduced a “data economy” project, intended to encourage companies to think of consumers as participants in the information economy, and not just as data-harvesting opportunities. The venture includes a site called WeTheData.com, which looks at current obstacles to information sharing.

Ken Anderson, a senior research scientist at Intel Labs who oversees the project, compares corporate data-hoarding today to a faulty mind-set of the fast-food industry in the early 1980s. Back then, he says, fast-food chains thought that they should open outlets only at a good distance from their competitors. But when food courts in malls became popular, he says, those restaurant chains realized that they benefited from shared retail space.

“If you put it all in one place, you get more business,” says Mr. Anderson, a cultural anthropologist who studies how people interact with technology.

The same goes for consumer data. He envisions an online answer to food courts — an information smorgasbord where consumers could browse their own records. “We are trying to show companies the value of opening data up” he says, “and having them be more communal in nature.”

Bucks Blog: Nuances of Credit Scoring Still Elude Consumers

Consumers still have many misunderstandings about the details of credit scoring, like the impact of having several inquiries on their report around the same time, according to the Consumer Federation of America.

The federation and VantageScore Solutions, creator of a score that competes with the heavily used FICO score, commissioned a survey to gauge the public’s understanding of credit scoring and the factors that affect a credit report.

A credit score is a three-digit number, based on information in your credit report, that lenders use to help gauge the risk of lending you money. Both FICO, the most widely used scoring model, as well as the newest version of the competing Vantage score, use a range from 300 to 850 — the higher the score, the lower the risk. (Earlier versions of the Vantage score use a range of 501 to 990.)

Just 7 percent of those surveyed knew that making several inquiries about a consumer loan, like a car loan or mortgage, in a short period of time won’t lower a borrower’s credit score. In fact, consumers should check multiple lenders to be sure they are getting the best rate, Stephen Brobeck, the federation’s executive director, said in a telephone briefing about the findings. This misunderstanding may hamper comparison shopping for interest rates, and end up costing consumers extra on their loans, he said.

Generally, multiple similar inquiries within a one- to two-week period are recognized as comparison shopping, so they count as one inquiry and don’t greatly affect your score, he said. Even if the inquiries span more than two weeks, it’s generally worth the effort because the potential savings outweigh a minor impact on your score, he said. “Consumers should not worry that comparison shopping for a loan in a week or two will lower their scores,” he said.

It’s a different situation, however, if you apply for multiple store credit cards in a short period of time. Such inquiries are clearly separate applications for credit, and may be detrimental to your score, said Barrett Burns, president and chief executive of VantageScore Solutions.

Consumers were also uninformed about the impact of co-signing for a student loan for a child.  About a third didn’t know that even one late payment could harm the credit score of the loan’s co-signer.

Consumers were also not aware of the relative cost of having a low credit score. About 80 percent underestimated, for example, the increase in interest costs due to a low credit score when taking out a $20,000, 60-month auto loan. (The correct answer, according to a quiz offered by the federation, is that a person with a low score will pay around $5,000 more than a person with a high score.)

To see how much you know about credit scores, and how to improve them, answer the questions at creditscorequiz.org. The updated quiz covers many of the questions asked in the survey.

The telephone survey of 1,022 adults, including both land lines and cellphones, was conducted by ORC International on April 25 through 28. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points. (The survey results can’t be compared with prior years’ surveys because of a change in methodology, including the addition of cellphones to the survey sample.)

The federation offers these tips for maintaining a healthy credit score: pay your bills on time each month; don’t put the maximum amount on your credit cards; pay down debt, rather than just moving it around to new cards; check your credit reports for potential errors. You can check them free at annualcreditreport.com.

Were you aware that comparison shopping for rates won’t harm your credit score?

Bucks Blog: The Cost to Consumers of a Data Breach

A new analysis of a huge data breach last year in Utah estimates that more than 120,000 cases of fraud will occur as a result of information stolen.

Javelin Strategy & Research’s analysis also estimates that each incident will result in more than $3,300 in losses, on average, and each consumer who is ultimately victimized as a result of the breach will spend about 20 hours and $770 on lawyers and time lost from work to resolve the case.

Ripple effects from the incident in the spring of 2012 will also prove costly to banks and businesses that may also suffer fraud as a result of the stolen information, said Al Pascual, a security, risk and fraud analyst at Javelin.

“We all need to be aware that breaches are occurring,” he said. “Breaches lead to fraud, and fraud affects all of us.”

Using the specifics of the Utah breach, Javelin applied what it has learned from its prior research about the impact of such breaches — namely, that having your personal information compromised makes you more likely to become a victim of fraud. Javelin estimates that roughly one in four recipients of a data-breach letter ultimately become fraud victims. (The estimate is based on information provided by consumers themselves, rather than law enforcement.)

“These breaches are driving fraud,” Mr. Pascual said. Criminals, he said, are generally not digging through trash or stealing mail to obtain personal data. “They’re stealing it digitally,” he said.

In the Utah case, about 280,000 Social Security numbers belonging to participants in the state Medicaid and Child Health Insurance Program were stolen from a database maintained by the Utah Department of Health. In addition, less sensitive pieces of information on another 500,000 participants were stolen.

Social Security numbers are particularly dangerous in the hands of criminals, because they can be used in combination with other information about you to create or access bank accounts and obtain credit.

The Social Security numbers were used by the department to verify eligibility for the insurance programs. But a contractor did not safeguard the server where the data was stored. The information was not encrypted and was protected only by a weak password that was easily hacked, the Javelin report said.

There may be little that individual consumers can do to prevent such a breach. But there are steps they can, and should, take to protect themselves, if they are notified that their Social Security number has been compromised in a data breach, Mr. Pascual said.

First, you should contact your bank and explain what has happened because many banks still use Social Security numbers to verify customer identity. You can ask for an alternative means of verification, like a specially assigned PIN, or a series of questions known as “dynamic” authentication. For instance, the bank may ask you about the size of recent transactions, or other details that only you would be likely to know, before allowing access to your account online or over the phone.

If the bank isn’t willing or able to provide an alternate method of verification, “It may be worth looking at institutions that offer better protection,” Mr. Pascual said.

Even if you haven’t had your information compromised, you should make use of your bank’s automatic account alerts. Such systems send you an e-mail or text message if unauthorized changes are made to your account, like the addition of a new authorized user or a new bill payment account, or a change of address. They can also notify you of significant transactions, like large withdrawals or transfers. “The consumer is going to know first whether a transaction is valid or not,” he said.

If you’re the victim of a breach and are offered free credit monitoring, you should take advantage of the service, he said. In the Utah case, victims were offered two years of credit monitoring and identity theft insurance.

Ultimately, banks should stop using Social Security numbers as identifiers, he said.

Have you had your personal information stolen? Did fraud occur as a result?