But actually, he thought as he re-adjusted the Ministry of Plenty’s figures, it was not even forgery. It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another. Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connexion with anything in the real world, not even the kind of connexion that is contained in a direct lie. Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version. A great deal of the time you were expected to make them up out of your head.
Back in late January, when it became clear that the Biden Administration was planning on announcing some sort of "no excuse needed" COVID Special Enrollment Period for the federal ACA exchange, I did a little back-of-the-envelope math to try and get an idea of how many additional people might enroll via HealthCare.Gov than you'd normally see via "standard" Special Enrollment Periods.
At the time, I concluded that for a 60-day SEP of this nature (that is, one completely open to all comers regardless of whether they had a Qualifying Life Experience (QLE)or not), you might be looking at perhaps an extra 400,000 people. selecting plans during that time period. This would be on top of the 4,200/day who enrolled thru HC.gov between the end of Open Enrollment and the end of May via SEPs over the past couple of years, which would be roughly 254,000 for a 60-day period.
March 02, 2021 - In a nationwide case, two individuals have been found guilty of an Affordable Care Act enrollment fraud scheme that used individuals in need of substance abuse care and falsely enrolled them in Affordable Care Act plans, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced.
The defendants, Jeffrey White and Nicholas White who are father and son respectively, sought to enroll individuals in Affordable Care Act plans in states other than their own, specifically states that had high reimbursement rates for substance abuse treatment.
The two men went so far as to create fake residential addresses and cell phone numbers with accurate area codes that would direct the call to the Whites’ phones.
I'm a couple of weeks behind on this (the full #AmRescuePlan, #HR1319, already passed the House late last Friday night), but Medicaid expansion is one of the core issues I cover here, so it didn't feel right not to give this a write-up.
Before the Affordable Care Act was passed, only certain populations were eligible for Medicaid. Low-income children, pregnant women, parents of minor children and those with certain disabilities and so forth were eligible up to a certain household income threshold ranging from as a ceiling of as little as 13% of the Federal Poverty Line (parents in Alabama) to as much as 375% FPL (pregnant women and newborn infants in, interestingly, Iowa).
Uninsured Special Enrollment Period in Idaho Begins March 1
Idahoans who enroll will have coverage beginning April 1, 2021
BOISE, Idaho – Your Health Idaho, the state insurance exchange, reopens today for Idahoans still seeking 2021 health insurance. Between March 1, and March 31, 2021, uninsured Idahoans can enroll in comprehensive health insurance coverage through the Uninsured Special Enrollment Period.
This Special Enrollment Period is available for any uninsured Idahoan who missed the open enrollment window and is still seeking health insurance for 2021. Idahoans who enroll by the March 31, deadline will have coverage beginning April 1, 2021.
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. For cases per capita, the most obvious point is that New York and New Jersey, which towered over every other state last spring, are now dwarfed by North & South Dakota, although things are pretty horrible nearly everywhere now.
1 out of every 8 residents of North & South Dakota's entire populations have tested positive for COVID-19 over the past year.
Rhode Island is up to over 1 out of every 9 residents.
Utah, Iowa, Tennessee, Arizona, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Nebraska, Kansas, Alabama and South Carolina are up to 1 out of every 10 residents.
42 states have seen at least 1 out of every 15 residents test positive.
EVERY state except Washington, Oregon, Maine, Vermont & Hawaii, along with the territories of Guam, U.S. Virgin Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands and American Samoa have now surpassed 1 out of every 20 residents having tested positive.
OK, Covered California hasn't actually released an official press release or Open Enrollment Report, but I have acquired a single slide which was delivered at a university presentation by Covered CA head Peter Lee the other day. It doesn't provide tons of detail but give the most important toplines (the way the graph breaks out the numbers is a little confusing but I figured it out:
Total QHP selections from 11/01/20 - 1/31/21: 1.63 million, a record high for the state
This is a 5.9% increase year over year from the 2020 OEP's 1.54 million (it says 1.57 million on the graph but the official CMS tally is 1,538,819).
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:
Every county except those in Alaska lists the 2020 Biden/Trump partisan lean; Alaska still uses the 2016 Clinton/Trump results. 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 these updates in mind, here's the top 100 counties ranked by per capita COVID-19 cases as of Thursday, February 25th, 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
