If you look at the actual legislative text of the final version of the Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act (PPACA, or simply ACA), the table describing the applicable maximum percentage of income that exchange-based enrollees have to pay for their premiums looks like the table below:

(Notably missing is the lower-bound 100% FPL subsidy eligibility cut-off; there's a separate section of the law which notes the 100% threshold but makes an exception for certain lawfully-present immigrants who earn less than 100% FPL but who aren't eligible for Medicaid for various reasons and are given an exception).

This just in via Connect for Health Colorado:

One Month In, More Than 4,000 Coloradans Sign Up During Exchange's Uninsured Enrollment Period

DENVER – 4,683 previously uninsured Coloradans signed up for a 2021 health insurance plan through Colorado’s Exchange between Monday, February 8 and the end of day Friday, March 5. That’s more than 1,000 new medical enrollments each week during the first month of Colorado’s Uninsured Enrollment Period.

That's an average of 180/day over 26 days for Colorado. I don't know exactly how many Special Enrollment Period (SEP) enrollees they had during the same time period in prior years, but I can estimate based on their monthly dashboards:

via KNPR:

In the face of the continuing COVID-19 pandemic, President Joe Biden reopened enrollment in the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance exchanges.

For Nevadans, that means the Silver State Health Insurance Exchange is back in business.

The exchange connects Nevadans to health plans compliant with the Affordable Care Act, and it’s the only place consumers can access any federal subsidies.

“As soon as Nevada learned of the news from the federal government, we took immediate action to plan and collaborate with our insurance carriers and the statewide network of 750-plus brokers and navigators to implement a seamless, streamlined process for Nevadans,” said Heather Korbulic, executive director of Silver State Health Insurance Exchange.

Korbulic told KNPR's State of Nevada that there has already been a lot of interest from people around the state. 

"We're pretty excited about the uptake that we've already started seeing and we think this is a wonderful opportunity for Nevadans to get connected to Nevada HealthLink," she said.

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.

Important:

  • Every county except those in Alaska lists the 2020 Biden/Trump partisan lean; Alaska still uses the 2016 Clinton/Trump results (the 2020 Alaska results are only available by state legislative district, not by county/borough for some reason...if anyone has that info let me know)
  • 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 those caveats in mind, here's the top 100 counties ranked by per capita COVID-19 cases as of Friday, March 5th, 2021 (click image for high-res version).

  • Blue = Joe Biden won by more than 6 points
  • Orange = Donald Trump won by more than 6 points
  • Yellow = Swing District (Biden or Trump won by less than 6 points)

A picture is worth 1,000 words and all that.

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 Dakota, South Dakota and Rhode Island have tested positive for COVID-19 over the past year.

1 out of every 9 residents of Utah, Iowa, Tennessee, Arizona and Oklahoma have tested positive.

1 out of 10 in Arkansas, Nebraska, Kansas, Alabama and South Carolina.

1 out of 15 in 42 states.

1 out of 20 in 47 states & territories.

via Access Health CT:

Access Health CT To Host Two Educational “Healthy Chats” During Special Enrollment Period

  • Free Virtual Sessions to Help Uninsured Connecticut Residents Get Covered    

HARTFORD, Conn. (March 4, 2021) — Access Health CT (AHCT) announced today it will host two educational sessions called “Healthy Chats” on Tuesday, March 9 at 6:00 p.m. and Wednesday, March 10 at 6:00 p.m. (Spanish only) to help Connecticut residents learn about plan options, financial help, low-cost and free coverage and tips to stay covered during the Special Enrollment Period that runs until March 15, 2021*. The Special Enrollment Period is for consumers who are not currently enrolled in coverage through AHCT.

About these Healthy Chats

The Healthy Chat events are free and will be held virtually via Zoom (in English & Spanish). To join, attendees can access the event here, or here.

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.

Answer: When you start seeing consumer fraud stories in the vein of Rick Scott's 1990's Medicare fraud scam.

Via Kelsey Waddill of Health Payer Intelligence:

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.

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