A sizable minority of Americans don’t understand that Obamacare is just another name for the Affordable Care Act.
This finding, from a poll by Morning Consult, illustrates the extent of public confusion over a health law that President Trump and Republicans in Congress hope to repeal.
In the survey, 35 percent of respondents said either they thought Obamacare and the Affordable Care Act were different policies (17 percent) or didn’t know if they were the same or different (18 percent). This confusion was more pronounced among people 18 to 29 and those who earn less than $50,000 — two groups that could be significantly affected by repeal.
...When respondents were asked what would happen if Obamacare were repealed, even more people were stumped. Approximately 45 percent did not know that the A.C.A. would be repealed. Twelve percent of Americans said the A.C.A. would not be repealed, and 32 percent said they didn’t know.
I've been cautioned that these numbers are preliminary, but that's true of all of the "final" enrollment numbers to date; there are often minor clerical corrections and the like before the final numbers are baked in.
Anyway, here's the OE4 QHP enrollment numbers for the DC exchange, which is up about 3.1% over last year.
However, according to the official ASPE report for 2016 Open Enrollment, DC's QHP tally was slightly lower (22,693); since that's the official total used by HHS, that's what I'm going with, which means they've enrolled about 4.1% more this year.
LT. GOVERNOR WYMAN, ACCESS HEALTH CT ANNOUNCE 2017 OPEN ENROLLMENT NUMBERS
111,524 Residents Enrolled Through Access Health CT; 13,791 are New to the Exchange
(HARTFORD, Conn.) – Lieutenant Governor Nancy Wyman, Chair of the Board of Access Health CT (AHCT), and AHCT CEO Jim Wadleigh today announced that the state’s health insurance exchange enrolled 111,524 residents during the 2017 Open Enrollment Period, which ended at midnight on January 31, 2017. Of those enrollees, 13,791 consumers are brand new to the exchange. In addition, 5,000 people came through AHCT seeking dental coverage and 1,467 enrolled in health coverage through the Small Business Program.
Covered California Finishes Fourth Open Enrollment With More Than 412,000 New Consumers and Strong Participation From Young Enrollees
New plan selections met enrollment projections for the fourth open-enrollment period.
Nearly 50,000 consumers signed up for health care coverage in the final two days before the Jan. 31 deadline.
Strong finish and overall enrollment are credited to effective work by Certified Insurance Agents and enrollers and robust television, digital, print and outdoor advertising that ran throughout the open-enrollment period.
The crucial demographic of young adults ages 18–34 accounted for 37 percent of enrollment, contributing to a healthy risk mix for 2017.
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Covered California announced Monday that it finished the open-enrollment period with 412,105 new consumers signing up for health coverage.
Today marks the end of our fourth and by far most successful Open Enrollment period. The number of plan selections ran 12% ahead of last year’s pace and the volume of last-minute customers Monday and Tuesday led us to extend sign-ups for three days for those who started the process before Tuesday’s deadline.
I share this information with extreme gratitude to our dedicated staff, our Assistance Network, our Broker partners, our health insurance company partners and the many other supportive stakeholders who helped us move forward with our shared mission no matter the headwinds we encountered along the way.
In 1897, the Indiana state House passed a bill which would have attempted to legally defined the value of π (Pi) as 3.2. Yes, I'm quite serious:
Any high school geometry student worth his or her protractor knows that pi is an irrational number, but if you’ve got to approximate the famed ratio, 3.14 will work in a pinch. That wasn’t so much the case in late-19th-century Indiana, though. That’s when the state’s legislators tried to pass a bill that legally defined the value of pi as 3.2.
The very notion of legislatively changing a mathematical constant sounds so crazy that it just has to be an urban legend, right? Nope. As unbelievable as it sounds, a bill that would have effectively redefined pi as 3.2 came up before the Indiana legislature in 1897.
As I noted last Friday, there's pretty good evidence that the Trump administration killing off most of the final HealthCare.Gov open enrollment deadline TV ads was directly responsible for a significant portion of the OE4 enrollment reduction on the federal exchange. The most obvious evidence of this is that in the final, critical 5 days of the period (when there's always been a significant spike in last-minute enrollees), the state-based exchanges (which run their own marketing campaigns) saw a 1.5% enrollment increase (at least 44,000 people) at the same time that HC.gov enrollment fell by 5% (450,000 people) short. This discrepancy between the state exchanges and the federal one will become a bit larger once the final enrollment numbers from CT, DC, ID, MA, MN, RI & VT come in.
Republicans begin to grumble: Why haven't we repealed Obamacare yet?
...The sentiment is beginning to simmer within the influential conservative wing of the Republican Party and hints at what could be the opening of an intra-party rift as the GOP's mission to overhaul the country's health care system appears to be losing steam.
...That shift in tone has irked other Republicans who are eager to take a swift vote to roll back as much of Obamacare as possible. Their fear: their conservative constituents back home won't settle for anything else.
"For goodness sake, we should be able to put something on President Trump's desk that's at least as good as what we put on President Obama's desk. Not something watered down," Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, told CNN in an interview. "Let's repeal it. Let's do what the voters sent us here to do."
MAJOR UPDATE 3/22/17: As I've noted repeatedly, my estimates of how many people are at risk of losing their coverage has always been based on the assumption of full repeal with immediate effect and, most importantly, no replacement healthcare policy whatsoever. I had to do it this way at first because there was no Republican replacement plan available until a couple of weeks ago. Then, when the AHCA plan was released, I didn't have the time or expertise to properly overhaul my projections accordingly.
Fortunately, the Center for American Progress does have the time, manpower and expertise to do exactly this. They crunched the numbers and, based in part on the recent Congressional Budget Office scoring of the AHCA, put together their own fully-detailed analysis of what impact partially repealing the ACA by passing the AHCA would have on coverage losses.
In light of this, at this point you can pretty much ignore everything below, as it no longer applies; the question is no longer "what happens if the ACA is repealed without anything replacing it?" but rather "what happens if the ACA is partially gutted and replaced with the AHCA?"
Unfortunately, due to the sheer amount of time it would take to do so, and the fact that the House is voting on the AHCA tomorrow (Thursday, 3/23), I don't have time to completely update/overhaul the Google Docs version of this data.
2017 using my known flawed data was running .96% behind 2016 on the January 14th inclusive update. 2017 ended up running 5.25% behind 2016 on Healthcare.gov states. The increment (using favorable to the null hypothesis data) slowdown in pace that can be attributed to Trump Administration actions is 5.25-.96 or 4.29% of enrollment was lost due to the executive order and other Trump administration actions such as shutting down some outreach and advertising in the last eleven days of enrollment.
