A definitely-NOT-comprehensive selection of opinions regarding the Republican Party's imminent "Repeal & Delay" strategy for the Affordable Care Act:
What outside experts are saying about repeal and delay:
American Academy of Actuaries: “Repealing major provisions of the ACA would raise immediate concerns that individual market enrollment would decline, causing the risk pools to deteriorate and premiums to become less affordable. Even if the effective date of a repeal is delayed, the threat of a deterioration of the risk pool could lead additional insurers to reconsider their participation in the individual market.” [Letter to Congress, 12/7/16]
Nick Gerhart (Iowa Republican Insurance Commissioner): “If you're going to repeal this, I hope that there's a replacement stapled to that bill.” [NPR, 11/21/16]
New York is a little different: For one thing, they haven’t actually released any 2017 Open Enrollment data yet (other than a cryptic “55K enrolled over a 3-day period", which isn't very useful). They should be up to around 200K w/out auto-renewals by now. More significantly, they're one of only 2 states (Minnesota's the other) which features the ACA's Basic Health Plan. Unlike QHPs, which are divided into subsidized and unsubsidized enrollees, the BHP program is entirely dependent on ACA financing, so if the law is repealed, all BHP enrollees are kicked to the curb, just like Medicaid expansion enrollees would be.
OK, this appears to be quickly turning into my next project thing. The methodology here is pretty much the same as the other states; the only major difference is that while I do know the total Medicaid enrollment for each county (as of December 2016), I don't have that broken out between traditional and expanded Medicaid. Fortunately, I have a hard state-wide number for that: Around 398,000, or roughly 20.8% of the state-wide total. I've therefore multiplied each county number by 20.8% to get a rough estimate of the ACA expansion tally for each.
Like Texas, I'm also no longer expecting Arizona to beat last year's Open Enrollment total by much. Assuming 209K QHP selections, there should be around 125K indy market enrollees and 399K Medicaid expansion enrollees who'll be in a world of hurt post-repeal, or roughly 524,000 altogether.
(sigh) OK, after doing this for Michigan earlier today, I said that I wasn't gonna do this for every state, and I'm not...but the irony is that the 19 non-expansion states are actually easier to compile this data for than the expansion states...because you can't rip away healthcare from someone you never provided it to in the first place. Anyway, someone requested that I do a county-level estimate of how many people would likely lose their healthcare coverage in Texas under a full repeal of the Affordable Care Act, so here it is.
Regular readers (and Twitter followers) know that for the past month I've been heavily pushing my state-by-state analysis projecting how many people I expect to lose their healthcare coverage if/when the Republican-held Congress follows through on their promise to repeal the Affordable Care Act. As noted in that post and the various links within it, part of the projection is very specific and confirmed (ie, the exact number of Medicaid expansion enrollees), while the rest is more speculative. For one thing, I don't know exactly how many people will have enrolled in ACA exchange plans, because we're still in the middle of the open enrollment period; even then, the percentage of those enrollees who will be receiving APTC assistance is still unknown as well...and even then, not all of those folks will be receiving substantial subsidy assistance which would make or break their ability to keep their policy.
It's New Year's Day, so I figured I should indulge in a little year-end navel-gazing by looking back and seeing which posts generated the most traffic throughout the year. There's a good chance that this site won't survive the new year anyway, so what the heck.
Below is a daily traffic graph showing the days with the biggest traffic spikes, along with the specific stories driving those spikes. I hope you don't mind, but I'd rather not post the actual numbers involved publicly.
As you can see, in 2016, there were 5 stories in particular which captured tons of traffic:
Every month I post an entry about the official CMS Medicaid enrollment report, documenting the increase in Medicaid enrollment since ACA expansion went into effect. The numbers were increasing dramatically every month for nearly two years, but started slowing down last fall as most of the expansion states started maxing out on their eligible enrollees. I wrote about the August 2016 report back on 11/20, and normally would be writing about the September report today. Instead, however, I'm skipping right past September, because the preliminary report for October was just released today:
UPDATE: Denis Byron, in the comments below, claims that Ryan Cooper's story (and therefore, mine) is "incredibly deceptive" and that I should be "ashamed" of myself for basing this entry on it. I've contacted Cooper about Byron's claims and will update the article if Cooper responds. Byron is correct that I am by no means a Medicare expert, so I'll leave it at that for the moment.
