The program has been under siege from the start, including from the insurance industry. Before the law’s passage, government grants to help them get going were switched to loans. None of that money could go for advertising — a wounding rule for new insurers that needed to attract customers. Moreover, the amount available was cut from $10 billion to $6 billion and then later, as part of the administration’s budget deals with congressional Republicans, to $2.4 billion. Federal health officials abandoned plans for a co-op in every state.
So, let's see here: You're trying to create start-ups to enter an existing, mature market which is already dominated by major, behemoth-sized competitors which have almost unlimited funds. Naturally it makes total sense to a) make the seed money a loan with a tight payback time table; b) prevent them from advertising in a saturated market; and c) slash their budget by 75%.
Hold on tight, this is gonna be a big one; it covers stories dating back several weeks, so some of these might be completely irrelevant at this point, but...
I've promised not to reveal the actual number anywhere else until tomorrow, so you'll have to read the full piece to get my call...but I do have some important caveats, disclaimers and additional points which I can make here as well:
*IMPORTANT: This assumes that everyone currently enrolled sticks with their current policy next year. If enough people shop around and consider their options, the average premiums for various plans, various companies, in vartious states and nationally could end up being considerably lower (possibly coming in under 10% overall).
Again: Do not blindly autorenew! Contact your ACA exchange website/call center (or your insurance carrier, if you're enrolled directly through them) and check out your options before committing to your existing plan! In many cases, there will be a different plan which is a better value for you!
At last!! It's been extremely frustrating trying to lock down the 2016 average premium hikes for Pennsylvania, especially because their Insurance Dept. website has actually been very good about posting every requested rate change in an easy-to-read, comprehensive fashion.
The problem with PA's rate filings hasn't been on the percentage change side, it's on the covered lives side. I was able to compile enrollment numbers for some carriers but not others...including First Priority, which was requesting a 29.5% rate hike. Without knowing whether they had a huge chunk of the market or not, posting the "average" rate hikes without including theirs was kind of meaningless, since it could potentially jack that average up or down dramatically.
So, I finally kind of gave up on it, figuring that even when the approved rates were posted, they probably still wouldn't include the number of covered lives for each insurance company.
A quick update from Connecticut: Last month it looked like effectuated QHP enrollment at AccessHealthCT had increased a bit between June and September, from around 92.2K to 96.6K.
However, just moments ago at the AccessHealthCT board meeting, this graph was displayed, showing that effectuated enrollment has actually been dropping off gradually since March, which is actually exactly what you'd normally expect via normal attrition anyway.
In any event, according to this slide, CT currently has 95,601 effectuated QHP enrollees: 71,022 receiving tax credits (74%), 24,579 without (26%), which is down slightly from September. This is right in line with my (revised) national attrition estimates, which should taper off at around 9.7 million effectuated enrollees by the end of the year.
With things ramping up for the 2016 Open Enrollment Period (#OE3), there's not much point in my continuing to track 2015 QHP selections. The June CMS report confirmed that off-season enrollments have been tracking pretty closely to my estimates (slightly higher, actually, although the number later dropped from their plans due to legal residency issues also turned out to be much higher than I had expected).
In general, however, it's been averaging roughly 8,000 - 9,000 new QHP selections per day during the off-season, and will likely continue at about that rate for another few weeks (hitting roughly 13.9 million by the end of October) before tapering off as the 2016 enrollment season kicks into gear. I'm pretty certain that it'll close out the year with around 14 million QHP selections even, of which around 12.6 million will actually be paid for and around 9.7 million will still be enrolled as of the end of December.
With that in mind, here's the last 2015 Graph I'll be posting, which I've also superimposed over the full-year 2014 Graph for comparison (as always, click on the images below for the high-resolution versions):
But yes, Clay County, TN Director of Schools Jerry Strong is indeed blaming the Affordable Care Act for his county's decision to pull the plug on the entire district in the middle of the school year:
The economy is so bad in Clay County, Tennessee that school is canceled indefinitely.
The decision to ebb budget concerns by shutting academic doors came down on Thursday when Clay County Director of Schools Jerry Strong quite literally decided to lock the doors of the county’s schools. He was particularly concerned with partially unfunded government mandates and what he believed to be the effects of Obamacare making it impossible to keep funds in the green.
By contrast, the damage from the Risk Corridor program being crippled is specific, quantifiable and obvious: Company X lost $22 million in 2014; they were supposed to receive $20 million (or whatever) back in risk corridor reimbursements; the CMS dept. only has $2.5 million to pay them back with, period, so they have to eat the remaining $17.5 million loss until next year or the year after...if they're able to stick it out that long.
The Kentucky Health CO-OP couldn't stick it out that long...and it's possible that similar press releases may be forthcoming for a few other CO-OPs (and/or other smaller insurers) over the next week or so.
