According to a release from the company on Tuesday, the firm will no longer offer individual market plans through the Affordable Care Act in Dallas, Texas, and New Jersey.
..."We hope to return to these markets as we carry on with our mission to change healthcare in the US."
The "we hope to return" part suggests that Oscar will continue to be available off the exchange in New Jersey, since completely pulling out of a state means a carrier has to wait at least 5 years before re-entering. So...there's that, anyway.
...Oscar currently covers 7,000 people in Dallas and 26,000 in New Jersey.
California’s health insurance exchange estimates that its Obamacare premiums may rise 8 percent on average next year, which would end two consecutive years of more modest 4 percent increases.
The projected rate increase in California, included in the exchange’s proposed annual budget, comes amid growing nationwide concern about insurers seeking double-digit premium hikes in the health law’s insurance marketplaces.
...Insurers in California have submitted initial rates for 2017, but the final figures won’t be known until July after state officials conduct private negotiations.
Chad Terhune reported today that Covered California, the largest state-run ACA exchange in the country, released their 2016-2017 fiscal year projected budget, which includes a mountain of useful enrollment data...some of which is positive, some negative and some of which depends on your POV:
California’s health insurance exchange estimates that its Obamacare premiums may rise 8 percent on average next year, which would end two consecutive years of more modest 4 percent increases.
The projected rate increase in California, included in the exchange’s proposed annual budget, comes amid growing nationwide concern about insurers seeking double-digit premium hikes in the health law’s insurance marketplaces.
...Insurers in California have submitted initial rates for 2017, but the final figures won’t be known until July after state officials conduct private negotiations.
According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, California averaged around 7.8 million Medicaid/CHIP enrollees prior to the ACA; this number has since shot up about 58%, to 12.3 million people.
One of the chief arguments in favor of the ACA has always been that uninsured people tend to not get treated for ailments/injuries at all (for obvious reasons), and then end up going to the emergency room when that gangrenous foot leaves them no choice. Not only does this end up costing much more to treat, the hospital is also stuck footing the bill (no pun intended) since the uninsured also tend not to have any money to pay out of pocket either (if they did, the odds are that they'd have some form of insurance, after all).
Covered California held a press call a few minutes ago in which they released detailed enrollment numbers for the 2016 Open Enrollment Period, broken down a number of different ways, including by rate region and individual carrier market share. They even broke the individual numbers out between renewals and new enrollees.
Unfortunately, I only caught half the call, but the full press release should be coming out momentarily which is supposed to have all of the numbers broken out every which way.
Until then, here are some oddball key points from the call:
I'm surprised by this for several reasons. The snowstorm was nearly a week ago, and there's still 3 days left for people to enroll as it is; are there still a lot of areas of Maryland coping with power outages/other disruptions which are making it unreasonable to expect people to get in under the wire?
Second, because CMS just stated pretty unequivocally that HealthCare.Gov will not be offering any official deadline extension (although, like the MD exchange, they did say that they'll have an "in line by midnight" exception). I assumed that if HC.gov was taking a "hard line stance" that the state exchanges would as well.
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Covered California announced that a surge of consumers interested in affordable, quality health care coverage had signed up through the agency this week. Through Jan. 27, more than 329,000 new enrollees had picked a health coverage plan during the current open-enrollment period. In addition, more than 148,000 new and renewing consumers had enrolled in the new optional family dental coverage.
As always, CoveredCA is happy to tout their new enrollees but has a weird thing about keeping mum on the number who renewed policies from 2015. This would make sense if the renewal number sucked, but it doesn't: The ASPE report through 12/27 clearly states that they had 1,411,664 QHP selections, of which 84% were renewals (automatic or active) by 2015 enrollees.
84% of 1,411,664 = roughly 1,186,000. Add 329K to that and you get 1.515 million QHP selections to date.
The final 2016 deadline to enroll in a qualifying healthcare plan for policies starting coverage as of March 1st officially ended as of MIDNIGHT on January 31st.
As usual however, there are a few caveats to this...but not as many as the past two years:
Add 290K to that and you're up to roughly 1.476 million people.
My official target for California is 1.80 million, so CoveredCA has reached 82% of where I was expecting them to be by now...which is right in line with where I think things stand nationally.
