Covered California Joins African-American Health Leaders Urging Californians to Get COVID-19 Vaccinations and Encouraging Consumers to Get Covered in 2021
MNsure's Open Enrollment Period Ends Tuesday, December 22 at Midnight
December 21, 2020
ST. PAUL, Minn.—Minnesotans looking for private health insurance beginning January 1, 2021, have until 11:59 p.m. on Tuesday, December 22 to enroll in coverage through MNsure.
"Don't miss your chance to get health insurance coverage in the new year," said MNsure CEO Nate Clark. "Come to MNsure.org to compare your options and see if you qualify for financial benefits to lower the cost of your insurance—most Minnesotans do! Get enrolled today and have the peace of mind that comes with knowing you’ve got comprehensive health coverage."
MNsure's Contact Center is open from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Monday, December 21 and 8 a.m. to midnight on Tuesday, December 22.
Most people qualify for financial help. Minnesotans can see their estimated eligibility for financial help by using MNsure's plan comparison tool.
I'm over a month late on this, but the DC Health Benefit Exchange Authority issued a mid-OEP enrollment report at their November board meeting (unfortunately they don't appear to have done so at their December meeting), so here it is as of 11/16.
Ther's not a whole lot of interest here, but it's worth noting that DC's effectuated enrollment in November was 7.6% higher than a year ago. This is again likely due to the extended "open" COVID-19 Special Enrollment Period in 2020:
Well, for good or for bad, it's finally here: The stripped-down-but-bipartisan COVID19 relief bill.
You can read the whole thing here...if you have a LOT of spare time on your hands. It's 5,600 pages long, 1.1 million words. For context, the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy is only half that length (576,000 words).
There's 1,000 explainers being written today about the most obvious stuff (the $600 direct relief checks, the extended & enhanced unemployment funding, etc etc), most of which falls far short of what's actually needed. Instead, I'm focusing on the ACA-related provisions. I already wrote about the surprise billing prohibition this morning, of course, but a quick initial scan of the text (which isn't easy...again, 5,600 pages...) reveals several other items directly related to the Affordable Care Act, so let's take a look! (Note: I'm sure I'm missing a few):
Over six months after House Democrats passed a robust COVID-19 relief bill (only to see it continuously blocked by Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell), it looks like Congress is finally set to compromise on a vastly stripped-down bipartisan bill which would provide at least a small amount of relief for hundreds of millions of American families and businesses.
While the bill is underwhelming (to put it mildly) overall, it does include several important provisions, one of which is a long-sought solution to a massive healthcare problem which existed long before COVID came knocking at our door nearly a year ago: Surprise Billing.
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.
I've made some more changes:
I've now completed updating the partisan lean for every county except Alaska (I'm having trouble getting that broken out by "County-Equivalent Region") to the 2020 Biden/Trump results. Alaska still uses the Clinton/Trump 2016 results, although I can't imagine more than one or two regions changed status there this year.
I've also added columns listing the actual Biden/Trump vote percentage for each county to give a feel for how partisan it is. Again, I'm defining "Swing District" as any county where the difference is less than 6.0%. There's 188 swing districts (out of over 3,100 total), with around 33.8 million Americans out of 332 million total, or roughly 10.2% of the U.S. population.
I've also added all U.S. territories, including a county-equivalent breakout for Puerto Rico, as well as American Samoa, Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands. None of these vote in the general Presidential election, of course, but I'm still tracking their COVID-19 case & death rates. None show up in the top 100 of either ranking, however. Note that Puerto Rico only includes the case breakout, not deaths, which are unavailable for some reason.
Finally, I corrected a significant error on my part in the Blue/Red County Ratio graph (see below)
With these updates in mind, here's the top 100 counties ranked by per capita COVID-19 cases as of Friday, December 18th (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
From the state totals one obvious pattern leaps out: enrollment is up 9.7% in states that have not enacted the ACA Medicaid expansion -- and down 0.5% in states that have expanded the expansion (including Nebraska, which opened the Medicaid expansion doors in October of this year).
Access Health CT, Connecticut's state-based ACA exchange, has updated their enrollment summary and now reports 102,049 residents have selected policies for 2021, including 15,310 new enrollees.
Last year they had a total of 107,833 QHP selections during Open Enrollment, which they're just 5.4% away from breaking.
In addition, as noted a few days ago, they're also extending their deadline by a full month (whcih they also did last year):
I was doing this earlier in the summer but stopped updating it in August; I've started over with a fresh spreadsheet and have expanded it to include every U.S. territory, including not just DC & Puerto Rico but also American Samoa, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands and even the Northern Mariana Islands.
I've done my best to label every state/territory, which obviously isn't easy to do for most of them given how tangled it gets in the middle. The most obvious point is that New York and New Jersey, which towered over every other state last spring, are now utterly dwarfed by North & South Dakota, which are skyrocketing.
North and South Dakota are the first two states where more than 10% of the entire population has tested positive (in fact, North Dakota is about to hit 12%. Iowa, Wisconsin, Nebraska and Utah could all potentially hit the 10% milestone by New Year's Eve as well.
