Charles Gaba's blog

Last month I noted that New Jersey is taking a leading role regarding protecting and improving the Affordable Care Act; the state legislature has passed bills which would:

  • Reinstate the ACA's individual mandate penalty,
  • Establish a robust reinsurance program to significantly lower insurance premiums for individual market enrollees,
  • Protect people from out-of-network "balance billing", and
  • Cancel out Trump's expansion of "Association Health Plans"

(New Jersey actually already had several other "ACA protection" laws on the books in the first place, including protections against short-term plans and "surprise billing".)

In addition, new Governor Phil Murphy had alread proven that he understands and supports the ACA; within days of taking office he had already issued an executive order telling all state agencies to do everything they reasonably can to inform the public about how to enroll during Open Enrollment and so forth.

A few years ago, New York State passed a law which allows uninsured pregnant women to enroll in ACA exchange coverage outside of the official Open Enrollment Period. Here's what Louise Norris and I wrote about it at the time:

On another note, I also want to use this as an opportunity to point out that maintaining quality health insurance coverage needs to be a priority year in and year out. Jenks notes that "Pregnancies are often unplanned, making limited enrollment periods impractical for many women." But can't that be said of any medical condition? In fact, I would say pregnancy is one aspect of healthcare that's probably much more likely to actually be planned. While about half of pregnancies are planned, I doubt the same could be said for cancers, heart attacks, or car accidents.

In other words, while not all pregnancies are planned, overall it's a lot less "random" than most other expensive healthcare incidents.

Sadly, this is pretty much exactly what I've been expecting:

Sen. Mike SHIRKEY (R-ClarkLake) said today he's hammered out an agreement with the administration and the House on creating work requirements for Medicaid recipients.

Speaking during a taping of "Off The Record," Shirkey said, "We have a deal." All sides have signed off on the exemptions to the work requirement, but he didn't get into all fo them pending a formal announcement coming as soon as later this week.

From the wording of this, it sounds an awful lot like "all sides" appears to refer to Republican Senator Shirkey, the rest of the Republican State Senate, the Republican State House and the Republican Governor.

Shirkey confirmed that the 29-hour job requirement in the Senate bill has been pared back to 20 to which he says, "I was hoping Michigan could take a leadership position and set a new standard for that." But rather than jeopardize the entire package, he compromised.

Just an hour or so ago I posted about a vice president of the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association stating point-blank what I and every other healthcare wonk under the sun has been warning for months (or years, really, if you include the original justification for the Individual Mandate under RomneyCare):

Kris Haltmeyer, a vice president at the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, told reporters that the premium increases were in part due to the repeal of ObamaCare’s individual mandate in the Republican tax reform bill in December...“With the repeal of the individual mandate and the failure of Congress to enact stabilization legislation, we are expecting premiums to go up substantially,” Haltmeyer said.

...He said the premium increases are “related to the loss of the mandate and then underlying medical costs.”

“Those two things have the most impact on the rate increases,” he added.

...Oh, and what comes after mandate repeal and underlying medical costs? You guessed it: #ShortAssPlans

One of the things Ford had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in ‘It’s a nice day’, 'You’re very tall’, or 'You seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you alright?’

--Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

via Peter Sullivan, The Hill:

A top insurance industry official said Wednesday that he expects “substantial” ObamaCare premium increases for 2019.

Kris Haltmeyer, a vice president at the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, told reporters that the premium increases were in part due to the repeal of ObamaCare’s individual mandate in the Republican tax reform bill in December. He also cited lawmakers’ failure to pass a bill aimed at lowering premiums, which fell apart earlier this year amid a partisan dispute over abortion restrictions.

It's become a tradition that every spring/summer/fall, I pore over the official SERFF database for every state, furiously searching for the ACA-compliant rate filings for the upcoming year.

The thing is, the SERFF database, in addition to being somewhat confusing and clunky to work with, includes a lot more than just "here's how much we want to raise our rates next year". Even after narrowing it down to just major medical health insurance policies, there are often still dozens of different forms and spreadsheets in the database, covering pretty much any change to any insurance policy for any carrier. If a carrier drops out of a market, there are forms. If they stop offering PPOs, there are forms. If they merge with or buy out another company, there are obviously forms. Even for the rate filings themselves, there are often a dozen or more different PDFs and/or spreadsheets included as supporting documentation.

Two big developments (or in one case, a lack of development) out of Virginia this evening.

First: Just yesterday I was noting that it looked as though after 8 years, Virginia's state legislature might finally be going ahead and expanding Medicaid under the ACA as soon as today:

The stage is set for a showdown in the Virginia Senate on Tuesday over a budget compromise negotiated by Senate Finance Co-Chairman Emmett Hanger, R-Augusta, and House Appropriations Chairman Chris Jones, R-Suffolk, to expand the state’s Medicaid program and pay for the state’s share through a new tax on hospital revenues that also would boost Medicaid payments for inpatient provider care.

Unfortunately...that didn't happen:

Governor Northam Statement on Virginia Senate Budget Process

This evening brought three major pieces of ACA-related news out of three different states:

First, in California, the State Senate passed SB-910, which wouldn't just limit short-term plans, but would outright prohibit them altogether. To my knowledge, CA would be the only state* where STPs wouldn't be allowed at all:

(*Correction: It turns out that New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts also ban Short-Term Plans as well, although according to Dania Palanker of the Center on Health Insurance Reforms at Georgetown University, California would be the first state to explicitly outlaw short-term plans as opposed to simply stating that all policies have to meet certain standards.)

SACRAMENTO – Today, the State Senate approved passage of Senate Bill 910, which prohibits the sale of short term limited duration health insurance in California.

Several stories like this throughout Monday afternoon/evening (via Michael Martz of the Richmond Times-Dispatch:

The stage is set for a showdown in the Virginia Senate on Tuesday over a budget compromise negotiated by Senate Finance Co-Chairman Emmett Hanger, R-Augusta, and House Appropriations Chairman Chris Jones, R-Suffolk, to expand the state’s Medicaid program and pay for the state’s share through a new tax on hospital revenues that also would boost Medicaid payments for inpatient provider care.

(The article goes into all the other non-Medicaid related stuff in the budget as well, of course, although some of it is obviously healthcare-related.)

*(To be honest, all of these types of bills--work requirements for Medicaid, drug testing for welfare benefits, photo ID for voting--have at least a tinge of racism to them no matter what, but at least this one isn't blatantly racist anymore).

This just in off the AP newswire...

LANSING, Mich. (AP) — The sponsor of proposed Medicaid work requirements said Monday that lawmakers are removing a provision to exempt recipients who live in Michigan counties with high unemployment, saying it would have been too difficult to administer and denying allegations of racism.

Republican Sen. Mike Shirkey of Clarklake also told The Associated Press that the proposed 29-hour-a week workforce engagement requirement for able-bodied adults is being lowered to “very close” to 20 weeks. That is in line with the three states that have enacted Medicaid work laws and with Michigan’s work requirement for food assistance beneficiaries.

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