CMS to Adopt Rules to Lower Health Care Costs in 2022 Federal Health Insurance Marketplace Plans
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) today adopted new provisions to lower maximum out-of-pocket costs to consumers by $400, while increasing competition and improving the consumer experience for millions of Americans who will rely on the Federal Health Insurance Marketplaces in plan year 2022. These actions demonstrate a strong commitment by the Biden-Harris Administration to protect and build on the Affordable Care Act (ACA), reduce health care costs, and make our health care system easier to navigate and more equitable.
Every year, I spend months painstakingly tracking every insurance carrier rate filing for the following year to determine just how much average insurance policy premiums on the individual market are projected to increase or decrease, and over the years I have a pretty good track record of nailing the average unsubsidized premium changes in each state.
However, it's never going to be dead on target, for a number of reasons: Rounding errors in the rate filings, missing enrollment data, outdated enrollment data, last-minute filing changes and so forth. In some states I'm only able to find on-exchange enrollments and have to estimate the corresponding off-exchange number for each carrier; in some cases the percent changes being approved don't match from the official Uniform Rate Review Template (URRT) form to the Actuarial Filing Memo, and sometimes neither of them match up with what shows up at RateReview.HealthCare.Gov!
The data below comes from the GitHub data repositories of Johns Hopkins University, except for Utah, which comes from the GitHub data of the New York Times due to JHU not breaking the state out by county but by "region" for some reason.
Important:
Every county except those in Alaska lists the 2020 Biden/Trump partisan lean; Alaska still uses the 2016 Clinton/Trump results (the 2020 Alaska results are only available by state legislative district, not by county/borough for some reason...if anyone has that info let me know)
I define a "Swing District" as one where the difference between Biden & Trump was less than 6.0%. FWIW, there's just 187 swing districts (out of over 3,100 total), with around 33.7 million Americans out of 332 million total, or roughly 10.2% of the U.S. population.
For the U.S. territories, Puerto Rico only includes the case breakout, not deaths, which are unavailable by county equivalent for some reason.
With those caveats in mind, here's the top 100 counties ranked by per capita COVID-19 cases as of Wednesday, April 28th, 2021 (click image for high-res version).
Blue = Joe Biden won by more than 6 points
Orange = Donald Trumpwon by more than 6 points
Yellow = Swing District (Biden or Trump won by less than 6 points)
Access Health CT Announces A Special Enrollment Period Allowing New and Existing Customers To Receive Significantly Greater Financial Help At Virtually Every Income Level
Under the American Rescue Plan, new and existing customers who buy health insurance through the Marketplace will become eligible to receive increased financial help to reduce their monthly payments
As expected, the healthcare section of President Biden's first address to a joint session of Congress (technically not a State of the Union, but close enough) included a call for making the subsidies expanded under the American Rescue Plan permanent as part of the American Families Plan.
Also as expected, he did not call for other major healthcare reform priorities to be baked into the #AmFamPlan.
He did, however, spend significant time calling for those other priorities to be passed separately from the AFP...considerably more than he did on the subsidies themselves.
Before I get into the proposed healthcare policies: Early on in the speech, Biden gave a shout-out to his Administration for the success of the current, ongoing COVID Special Enrollment Period:
After weeks of anticipation and jockeying for policy priorities to be included by various advocacy groups, President Biden is set to formally roll out the American Families Plan at a speech to a joint session of Congress this evening...the first such speech of his administration, falling just ahead of his 100th day in office.
The first half of Biden's larger "American Infrastructure Plan" is the "American Jobs Plan" which addresses "hard" infrastructure like road & bridge construction/repairs, green energy investment, broadband access, overhauling our clean water system and so forth.
...over the past few years, the voters of some of those states have decided to take it upon themselves to force their legislators/governors to expand Medicaid anyway, via statewide ballot initiative campaigns:
With the urgent push by an unusually wide array of Congressional Democrats in both the Houseand Senate to lower the eligibility age of Medicare from 65 to 60 (or 55), the Kaiser Family Foundation posted an analysis of what that might look like in real-world terms for the newly-eligible enrollees, and the results, while not surprising, are pretty striking when presented the way they are in the KFF study:
This morning, healthcare reform advocacy organization Protect Our Care held a webinar in which they went over the results of a new national survey of 1,200 Americans conducted a couple of weeks ago called, simply enough, "Next Steps on Healthcare: What Voters Want".
For the most part, none of the results are terribly surprising:
Lowering the cost of healthcare and expanding affordable health insurance coverage is a top priority for a large majority of voters.
There's strong support across the board for three major healthcare proposals:
Lowering the cost of health insurance for people who purchase coverage on their own
Giving Medicare the power to negotiate with drug companies for lower prices
Giving low-income Americans who are uninsured the opportunity to obtain health insurance at little or no cost
Several of the questions were more about the framing of the issues--that is, which specific types of messaging work best.
The American Rescue Plan provides new and expanded financial help that will dramatically lower health care premiums for people who purchase health insurance through Covered California.
Nearly 200,000 San Diegans, including the uninsured and people enrolled directly through a health insurance carrier, stand to benefit from the new financial help that is now available.
In order to maximize their savings, San Diegans need to enroll before the end of this month so they can begin benefitting from the new law on May 1.
Many people will be able to get a high-quality plan for as little as $1 per month, while currently insured consumers could save up to $700 per month on their coverage if they sign up through Covered California.
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Covered California announced that San Diegans have until April 30 to sign up for health insurance coverage, and start benefitting from new financial help available through the American Rescue Plan as early as May 1st. The landmark law provides new and increased federal tax credits that will lower health care premiums for an estimated 200,000 people in the region.
