In late September, the handful of CEOs leading Affordable Care Act-funded consumer operated and oriented plans traveled to Denver in search of answers.
The past year had been a difficult one. Their companies were struggling, awash in red ink and facing a mounting list of operational challenges. A few co-ops had already shut down, and regulators were circling several more. The fledgling health insurers needed more support from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services if they were going to survive. Most importantly, they needed a lot more money.
I know you're not supposed to repost entire articles, but this one is about as short & to the point as it gets. Go visit the Billings Gazette:
HELENA — Montana officials say about 5,500 people have signed up for Medicaid in the first week of expanded eligibility to the working poor.
Department of Health and Human Services Director Richard Opper announced the results of the initial wave of enrollments during a cabinet meeting Tuesday.
An estimated 70,000 people are eligible now that Medicaid has been expanded to people who earn up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level — $33,000 for a family of four.
That's about 8% of Montana's potential Medicaid expansion population in the first week. Not bad!
Wow! After 3 1/2 Republican debates spanning upwards of 13 hours or so (7 debates, actually, if you include the "Kiddie Tables" separately), a few hours ago FOX Business Channel's Maria Bartiromo finally asked a substantive question regarding the Affordable Care Act, and Carly Fiorina was the first Republican candidate to actually say anything substantive about it (note: I'm not counting the boilerplate "we need to repeal/replace Obamacare!" bits tossed on the plate like croutons by Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush).
The good news (relatively speaking) is that the 200,000-odd New Yorkers currently enrolled in about-to-be-defunct Health Republic NY Co-Op policies have been given an extra 15 days to find a new insurance provider (11/30 instead of 11/15), and that those who don't do in time will be automatically enrolled in a temporary (1-month only) policy with someone else to at least ensure coverage to tide them over through January. The temporary policy may or may not include their preferred doctors/hospitals, but it's better than having no coverage at all during the December gap period, anyway.
That seems pretty cut & dry. I've confirmed with the exchange that this number represents QHPs only; it doesn't include SHOP (small business) or standalone Dental plans.
Last year Colorado ended up with 140,327 QHP selections during open enrollment out of 11,688,074 total...or about 1.2% of the national total.
Dennis Blackburn has this splintered self-interest. The 56-year-old mechanic hasn’t worked since he lost his job 18 months ago at a tire company that supplies a diminishing number of local coal mines. “The old guy had to go home,” Blackburn says of his layoff.
He has a hereditary liver disorder, numbness in his hands and legs, back pain from folding his 6-foot-1-inch frame into 29-inch mine shafts as a young man, plus an extra heartbeat — the likely vestige of having been struck by lightning 15 years ago in his tin-roofed farmhouse.
According to 8 of the state-based exchanges (CO, CT, DC, ID, MD, MA, MN & WA), effectuated enrollments as of the end of September were up 2.7% from the end of June (or down just 0.1% if you disregard Massachusetts, which has some special circumstances).
However, the quarterly financial reports from 8 major insurance carriers claim that private exchange enrollments in September were down around 7.9% since the end of June.
This discrepancy continues with the release of the Colorado exchange's October enrollment report. As you can see, when you add up the effectuated tax credit enrollees (APTC/CSR) (78,670) and the full-price enrollees (64,485) as of October 31st, they total 143,155 people.
Things have been changing rapidly in the ongoing Health Republic of New York saga, and as recently as last night each development seemed to make the situation worse...but a few hours ago, Politco New York reporter Dan Goldberg posted a new story which indicates that the powers that be finally have some positive news:
In an effort to head off a potential health insurance disaster, state officials on Sunday announced a series of steps to protect roughly 200,000 customers who are set to lose their health coverage, and promised to investigate the company behind the crisis.
...And those were just the customers who were aware of the change. No one could say for certain how many were unaware they were about to lose their coverage, and other insurers operating on the exchange expressed concern that the customers most likely to pick a new plan were the ones most likely to be sick, a scenario of adverse selection that few companies were prepared to handle.
Last year, to my everlasting joy, the HHS Dept. finally started issuing not just big, bulky monthly ACA exchange enrollment reports but also began issuing simple weekly enrollment "Snapshot" reports, giving just the "top line" number of people who had selected Qualified Health Plans (QHPs) in the preceding week. The first few weeks they only gave out the national total, but a few weeks in they started breaking it out by state (and, eventually, even by major metropolitan areas).
The irony here is that if they had started doing exactly this in the first place back in 2013 (just the QHP tally per state on a weekly basis, nothing more than that) I almost certainly never would have bothered tracking ACA enrollments myself, and thus this website/project never would have started at all.
