As I just noted, today marks the 12th Anniversary of President Obama signing the ACA into law. To mark the occasion, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has released the final, official 2022 Open Enrollment Period (OEP) report, which I'll be breaking into several entries.
The next two tables look at the number of renewing enrollees who kept their existing (2021) ACA exchange policy vs. those who switched to a different policy for 2022. It's important to note that CMS only has data on this from the 33 states hosted on the federal exchange (HealthCare.Gov).
Of those, over 56% of renewing enrollees switched to a different policy (either through the same carrier or a different one). The other 44% either kept whatever policy they were enrolled in at the end of 2021 or were automatically switched to the closest equivalent in cases where that exact policy had been discontinued by the insurance carrier (this is known as being "crosswalked"):
As I just noted, today marks the 12th Anniversary of President Obama signing the ACA into law. To mark the occasion, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has released the final, official 2022 Open Enrollment Period (OEP) report, which I'll be breaking into several entries.
First up is the top line numbers: Just how many people selected Qualified Health Plans (QHPs) during the 2022 OEP, which ran from November 1st, 2021 through different ending dates depending on the state. In the 33 states hosted via the federal ACA exchange (HealthCare.Gov), as well as 9 of the 18 state-based marketplaces (SBMs), the ending date was January 15th, 2022.
For the remaining SBMs, the ending date was: 12/22/21 in Idaho; 1/19/22 in Colorado; 1/28/22 in Massachusetts; 1/31/22 in DC, Kentucky, New Jersey, New York & Rhode Island; and 2/04/22 in California:
Today is the 12th Anniversary of President Obama signing the Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act, aka the ACA (also aka "Obamacare"). This is the first in a series of posts based on press releases & reports released by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services today (CMS).
On 12-Year Anniversary of the Affordable Care Act, New HHS Report Shows Ways the Biden-Harris Administration’s American Rescue Plan Investments Are Lowering Health Care Costs and Expanding Coverage
Way back in the summer of 2020, then-Presidential candidate Joe Biden rolled out his official healthcare policy proposal. Part of the plan included the following:
Expanding coverage to low-income Americans. Access to affordable health insurance shouldn’t depend on your state’s politics. But today, state politics is getting in the way of coverage for millions of low-income Americans. Governors and state legislatures in 14 states have refused to take up the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of Medicaid eligibility, denying access to Medicaid for an estimated 4.9 million adults.
Biden’s plan will ensure these individuals get covered by offering premium-free access to the public option for those 4.9 million individuals who would be eligible for Medicaid but for their state’s inaction, and making sure their public option covers the full scope of Medicaid benefits. States that have already expanded Medicaid will have the choice of moving the expansion population to the premium-free public option as long as the states continue to pay their current share of the cost of covering those individuals.
It's been another six weeks since my last attempt to estimate a grim but vitally important number: Just how many Trump voters vs. Biden voters have become fatal victims of the GOP/FOX News coordinated anti-vaxx/anti-mask campaign to date, and what sort of impact might this end up having on the midterm elections this November?
As I said at the time, I'm not going to attempt to justify this cynical bean counting anymore...the evidence is now overwhelming that Republican leadership, in coordination with outlets like FOX News and other right-wing outlets, made a conscious decision in spring 2021 to push hard against Americans getting vaccinated against COVID-19 for purely cynical political math reasons.
For months I posted weekly looks at the rate of COVID-19 cases & deaths at the county level since the end of June, broken out by partisan lean (i.e, what percent of the vote Donald Trump received in 2020), as well as by the vaccination rate of each county in the U.S. (nonpartisan). This basically amounts to the point when the Delta Variant wave hit the U.S., although it had been quietly spreading under the radar for a few months prior to that.
More recently, I switched to posting the same data starting on December 15th, which is (roughly) the start of the Omicron variant wave (although this is fuzzier than the start of the Delta wave).
For years now, I've been a tireless advocate for dramatically expanding & improving the Affordable Care Act's Advance Premium Tax Credit (APTC) formula. This is the table which determines a) just how generous the ACA's health insurance premium tax credits are at different income levels and b) how far up the income ladder those financial subsidies extend.
Just over a year ago, the American Rescue Plan (ARP), passed by Democrats in Congress and signed into law by President Biden, did exactly what I've been clamouring for all this time: It made ACA subsidies far more generous while also removing the completely arbitrary income eligibility cut-off threshold (otherwise known as the "Subsidy Cliff."
As a refresher, the way the ACA subsidies work is as follows:
More than 65,000 Access Health CT enrollees would be impacted
HARTFORD, Conn. (March 16, 2022) — Access Health CT (AHCT) today announced that more than 65,000 Connecticut residents would be negatively impacted by reduced or eliminated financial help for health insurance if the increased financial assistance from the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) expires at the end of 2022.
The $178 million per year ($14.8 million per month) of assistance residents receive through ARPA will end unless the enhanced premium tax credits continue past 2022 through federal legislation.
“Ending increased financial help would have a significant impact on Connecticut residents,” said James Michel, Access Health CT Chief Executive Officer, “including progress made toward addressing health disparities. The American Rescue Plan Act makes health insurance coverage more affordable and accessible – greatly reducing the impact of social determinants of health.”
Over the past two years, I've run a lot of county-level COVID data analysis. I've plotted the data as scatter-plot graphs and bar graphs, and I even created a couple of animations which showed how the data changed over time.
Last November, while creating one of these animations, I also noticed something which made my jaw drop. I talked about it at the time, but it didn't seem to generate as much interest as I thought it merited, so today I'm plotting the data using a different layout: A simple line graph of COVID-19 death rates in the deepest Red and deepest Blue counties of the United States, plotted over time. As a bonus, in the process, a few other useful points revealed themselves visually as well.
