SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Covered California announced that 345,711 Californians newly selected a health plan for 2025 during open enrollment and more than 1.6 million Californians renewed their health insurance, bringing Covered California’s overall enrollment to a record-high of 1,979,504 consumers.
That's up another 10.9% vs. last year.
Enrollment rose for the fourth consecutive year after the passage of enhanced premium tax credits through the American Rescue Plan in 2021. The federal enhanced subsidies were supplemented by a California-only Cost-Sharing Reduction (CSR) program that Californians took advantage of the past two open enrollments.
Enrollment More Than Doubled Since the Murphy Administration Took Over Operations of Marketplace - Over a Half a Million New Jerseyans Signed Up for 2025 Coverage
Residents with a Qualifying Life Event or Who Meet Certain Income Levels Still Have Options to Get Covered
TRENTON — Governor Phil Murphy and New Jersey Department of Banking and Insurance Commissioner Justin Zimmerman today announced that Get Covered New Jersey – the State’s Official Health Insurance Marketplace – hit an all-time record enrollment with more than a half a million New Jerseyans signed up for 2025 health coverage. Enrollment on the marketplace has more than doubled since the Murphy Administration took over operations from the federal government and launched Get Covered New Jersey in 2020.
BREAKING: In response to doctors' lawsuit, Judge John Bates, a George W. Bush appointee, orders CDC, NIH, and FDA to put back up websites and datasets cited by the doctors in their lawsuit as having been relied upon and pulled down without notice.
Virginia’s Insurance Marketplace is proud to announce that more than 388,000 Virginians successfully enrolled in health care coverage during the Marketplace’s Open Enrollment Period, which ran from November 1, 2024, to January 22, 2025.
Among the 388,856 Virginians who secured health insurance plans through Virginia’s Insurance Marketplace, 69,000 were new enrollees. This is a 21% increase in new enrollments from last year’s Open Enrollment Period, marking a significant milestone for the Marketplace.
New enrollments may be up 21%, but overall enrollments are down 2.8% vs. last year, which is a bit of a head-scratcher since there doesn't seem to be any specific reason for enrollment to drop in VA this year (as opposed to NY, OR & NC which each had cannibalization of exchange enrollees by their Medicaid or Basic Health Plan programs this year).
Since my Internet Archive indexes of both CDC.gov and FDA.gov seem to have gotten a lot of positive responses, I'm following up by tackling a much larger federal healthcare department website: The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).
Unlike the FDA's website, which has around ~5,800 public-facing pages, or the CDC's site which has ~7,200, CMS.gov has a whopping ~75,000 pages.
Needless to say, it's going to take some time to index them all, so bear with me.
No, I don't plan on posting every press release issued by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services during the Musk/Trump Regime any more than I did under previous adminstrations, but this one attempts to directly address the single biggest Constitutional crisis going on at this very moment.
CMS has two senior Agency veterans – one focused on policy and one focused on operations – who are leading the collaboration with DOGE, including ensuring appropriate access to CMS systems and technology. We are taking a thoughtful approach to see where there may be opportunities for more effective and efficient use of resources in line with meeting the goals of President Trump.
Earlier this week I gained a lot of attention for generating (with the help of others) an index of the entire CDC.gov website, with direct links to all ~7,200 pages archived by the Internet Archive on or before 1/27/25.
At the time, I was scrambling to slap together something in light of the news that the Musk/Trump Regime had begun purging thousands of pages of critical public health information from federal websites, so I wasn't very sophisticated about how I did it: I simply broke all ~7,200 links into chunks of 500 apiece and pasted them into 15 pages.
A few days later we did something similar with FDA.gov, except this time I took the time to set it up with a drop-down menu with each page covering a different major topic.
At least...as far as I know...the links are from on or shortly before January 27, 2025. It's possible that they were already tinkering with and/or deleting pages/data prior to then.
I've significantly improved the interface for the FDA links: Instead of simply lumping all the links together, 500 to a page the way I did for the CDC, this time I've broken all of the links out into major topics as well as creating a drop-down menu for the topics to make it easier to navigate.
The White House is working on an executive order to fire thousands of U.S. Department of Health and Human Services workers, according to people familiar with the matter.
Under the order, the Food and Drug Administration,Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other health agencies would have to cut a certain percentage of employees.
...The agencies are responsible for a range of functions, from approving new drugs to tracing bird-flu outbreaks and researching cancer. A loss of staff could affect the efforts depending on which workers are cut and whether they are concentrated in particular areas.
...Agency officials have been told to prepare lists of probationary workers who have essential roles and must be retained, and of employees who don’t, according to people familiar with the instructions.
Federal employees must decide today whether to take the administration’s buyout offer. More than 40,000 federal workers to date have said they would resign under the deal.
It was in early 2021 that Congressional Democrats passed & President Biden signed the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), which among other things dramatically expanded & enhanced the original premium subsidy formula of the Affordable Care Act, finally bringing the financial aid sliding income scale up to the level it should have been in the first place over a decade earlier.
In addition to beefing up the subsidies along the entire 100 - 400% Federal Poverty Level (FPL) income scale, the ARPA also eliminated the much-maligned "Subsidy Cliff" at 400% FPL, wherein a household earning even $1 more than that had all premium subsidies cut off immediately, requiring middle-class families to pay full price for individual market health insurance policies.
Here's what the original ACA premium subsidy formula looked like compared to the current, enhanced subsidy formula:
