NOTE: The Weekly HealthCare.Gov Snapshot Reports are normally released at around 1:00pm on Wednesdays. I have a 1:00pm meeting today, so the odds are that I won't be able to write up a response/analysis of the weekly HC.gov numbers until late this afternoon.
THEREFORE, the following assumes that my estimate of appx. 370,000 QHP selections via HealthCare.Gov from 11/22 - 11/28 turns out to be accurate. Obviously if the number is significantly higher or lower than that, I'll have to tweak some of this.
Right on top of yesterday's study by the American Cancer Society linking the Affordable Care Act to a substantial improvement in early detection of cervical cancer, the Huffington Post's Jonathan Cohn reports that the Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality has released a different study claiming that 87,000 lives have been saved since 2010 from a reduction in medical errors, and guess what's getting the credit?
Hospitals have cut down on deadly medical errors, saving around 87,000 lives since 2010, according to a new government report.
Pinning down the precise reasons for this change is difficult, to say nothing of predicting whether the decline will continue. Improvement has slowed in just the last year, the report suggests. But many analysts think government initiatives within the Affordable Care Act have played a significant role in the progress so far.
In short, Obamacare may literally be saving lives.
DENVER — Between Nov.1 and Nov. 29, more than 46,000 Coloradans enrolled in health coverage for 2016, either in private health insurance purchased through the state health insurance Marketplace or in Medicaid, or Child Health Plan Plus (CHP+), according to new data released today by Connect for Health Colorado® and the Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing.
“The steady enrollment gains that we have seen during first month of Open Enrollment are very encouraging,” said Connect for Health Colorado® CEO Kevin Patterson. “But now we have just two short weeks to complete enrollment before December 15 – the deadline for coverage to take effect on January 1. I encourage anyone who has not signed up to do it today. Going to our website to find free, in-person help is a great way to start.”
Whether you are renewing or enrolling for the first time, you must complete enrollment by December 15, to have coverage January 1, and avoid a gap in your coverage. Open Enrollment runs through January 31.
Well, there's two more rather interesting developments to the Risk Corridor mess.
First of all, guess who's proudly claiming responsibility for helping destroy over a dozen businesses and kicking hundreds of thousands of people off of "the plan they like"? Marco Rubio.
Marco Rubio has killed ObamaCare
ObamaCare is on life support and we have one senator who we can thank for planning years ahead a way to cripple the fraudulent program: Marco Rubio.
In 2013, Joshua Green, a liberal, recognized the role Marco Rubio played in his so-called “devious plan to kill Obamacare”:
Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida will introduce a bill today that represents a new and potentially crippling line of attack against the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare.
...Rubio’s bill takes a new tack by seeking to abolish “risk corridors,” one of several mechanisms in the law meant to hold down premium costs and entice insurers to participate in the exchanges by ensuring they won’t lose a lot of money if they draw a costlier applicant pool than anticipated. Risk corridors function like Major League Baseball profit-sharing: Insurers who wind up with unexpectedly healthy applicants and lower costs will “pay in” money to the government, which in turn “pays out” to insurers with costlier applicants, thereby stabilizing the nascent market. (snip)
...Once Republicans took over Congress Rubio’s bill passed into law. There would be no bailouts of health insurers. There would be no bailouts for health insurers. Rubio predicted the problems years before others (as he has with all the foreign policy crises) and figured out a way to deal with them. He laid out his plans in his op-ed in the Wall Street Journal years ago.
The number of people shopping for medical insurance on the Spanish-language version of HealthCare.gov is lagging behind last year's interest, even as the Obama administration urges Hispanics to sign up for coverage under the Affordable Care Act.
Federal figures released Wednesday show that about 153,000 people used cuidadodesalud.gov during the first three weeks of the current enrollment season for ACA health plans, down from 244,000 during the same period a year ago.
“Openly welcoming a preordained veto, Republicans drove legislation to Senate passage Thursday aimed at crippling two of their favorite targets: President Barack Obama’s health care law and Planned Parenthood,” the AP reports.
“With a House rubber stamp expected in days, the bill would be the first to reach Obama’s desk demolishing his 2010 health care overhaul, one of his proudest domestic achievements, and halting federal payments to Planned Parenthood. Congress has voted dozens of times to repeal or weaken the health law and several times against Planned Parenthood’s funding, but until now Democrats thwarted Republicans from shipping the legislation to the White House.”
DON'T F*CKING TELL ME NEXT YEAR'S ELECTION DOESN'T MATTER. VOTE.
However, there's also some very positive news to report. 5 other major insurers have told UnitedHealthcare to chill out. Enrollments are chugging along nicely (HC.gov should have broken the 2 million mark on Saturday, and nationally we should be up to around 2.6 million). The exchange websites seem to be working smoothly across the board (or at least, if there've been any significant technical problems, I've yet to hear about them).
I've watched the original Star Wars trilogy countless times, but ever since my kid was born, every time I watch something catches my eye which I never noticed (or noticed but didn't think about) before.
So, my 9-year old and I are watching "Return of the Jedi" again today (in anticipation of The Force Awakens, of course). In an early scene in Jabba's palace, Princess Leia is sneaking around at night, in the dark, trying to remain undetected so she can free Han Solo from the Carbonite, right? So what does she immediately do?
She bumps head first into a large wind chime which is inexplicably hanging in the stairwell.
There's a lot of news stories of late about Colorado activists managing to successfully place a statewide initiative on the 2016 ballot which, if successful, would make Colorado the first state to move to a new Single Payer healthcare model.
I haven't written a whole lot about this so far, partly because we're still a year out, partly because I'm swamped with current Open Enrollment Period developments (believe me, I'll have more to say about it after the end of #OE3).
However, there's one meme which keeps coming up in the news which drives me a bit insane:
Hmmmm...over at Investor's Business Daily, Jed Graham looks at HealthCare.Gov's 3rd Weekly Snapshot report from a different angle: If you set aside renewals of current enrollees, how are things looking in terms of new additions?
As I noted in my detailed 2016 OE3 projection breakdown, nationally the HHS Dept. is projecting around 8.1 million renewals, plus around 4.5 million new additions, for a total of roughly 12.6 million QHP selections (expected to then dwindle down to roughly 10.0 million still enrolled/paying by the end of next year. In contrast, I'm more optimistic: I projected around 9.0 million renewals, plus 5.7 million new additions.
