Among the various provisions of the Affordable Care Act, the one which intrigued me the most was the creation of 23 "Consumer Operated and Oriented Plans", or "CO-OPs". The idea was to create non-profit quasi-public/private healthcare insurance organizations (similar in nature, I believe, to Credit Unions, except for health insurance), to compete with the private, profit-based insurance providers.
Unfortunately, as the Office of the Inspector General noted in a July report (in huge font size for some reason), after two Open Enrollment periods have come and gone, the ACA CO-OPs aren't doing very well for the most part, to put it mildly.
Last night I posted what seemed, at first, to be a merely-amusing (if a bit depressing) story about a Florida news station website accidentally (?) reposting a year-old AP newswire story about potential security vulnerabilities at Healthcare.Gov:
(I was originally going for Albert Brooks' famous quitting scene from "Lost in America"...unfortunately the audio cuts out after the first 30 seconds...)
OK, this is kind of cool (though I didn't find out about it until 6 months later)...
The link to this site is below the video at the actual YouTube link, and The Graph only onscreen for a second (and is obviously a bit outdated...the effectuated exchange enrollee number is more like 9.9 million as of now), but it's still pretty nifty.
WASHINGTON -- The government's own watchdogs tried to hack into HealthCare.gov earlier this year and found what they termed a critical vulnerability - but also came away with respect for some of the health insurance site's security features.
Those are among the conclusions of a report released Tuesday by the Health and Human Services Department inspector general, who focuses on health care fraud.
The report amounts to a mixed review for the federal website that serves as the portal to taxpayer-subsidized health plans for millions of Americans. Open enrollment season starts Nov. 15.
So-called "white hat" or ethical hackers from the inspector general's office found a weakness, but when they attempted to exploit it like a malicious hacker would, they were blocked by the system's defenses.
I've been debating (pun intended!) how to handle the ongoing 2016 Presidential primary season when it comes to the ACA. While the ACA has barely come up at all in either of the first 2 GOP debates, it's almost certainly going to start popping up sooner or later (and I'll be stunned if it isn't a major topic at the Democratic debates).
I'm gonna try doing an occasional "Candidate Roundup" with the latest ACA-related happenings when it comes to the various candidates...and there have been three major developments this week:
In 2014, there was a tremendous amount of focus placed on whether or not "Obamacare Enrollments" (specifically referring to private ACA exchange enrollments) would or wouldn't hit the seemingly all-powerful target of 7 million people. Hell, the original (and still primary) focus of this website was specifically to do live tracking of private ACA exchange enrollments across all 50 states (+DC).
How did the "7 Million" figure become so all-powerful? As long-time readers (or anyone who remembers the past 2 years) will recall, "7 Million" took on an almost mystical quality. The media, along with detractors and supporters alike, began treating it as a make-or-break number; if the administration was able to hit the 7M mark, all would be well, and if they didn't, the earth would open up and swallow the entire nation whole.
Health Premiums Have Climbed $4,865 Since Obama Promised to Cut Them $2,500
Ouch. Sounds pretty bad, right? President Obama's "I'll cut premiums by $2,500 per family" promise has taken a lot of heat over the years, and rightly so. The figure originated in a back-of-the-envelope projection calculated by economist David Cutler, but referred to total healthcare costs:
We reached out to David Cutler, an economist who advised Obama during the 2008 campaign and helped calculate the $2,500 figure that appeared in Obama's speeches. He said the calculation encompassed total health care costs, not just premiums. These would include out-of-pocket costs, employer-provided insurance costs, and taxes to pay for public insurance programs.
In today's speech at the Howard University College of Medicine, HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell started ramping things up for the 2016 Open Enrollment Season (which I'm gonna designate #ACA2016 unless someone else comes up with something better) by dropping some data points.
Among these was this one:
Almost half of the uninsured individuals who are likely eligible for Marketplace plans are between the ages of 18 and 34.
This is really important, because only about 28% of those who enrolled in exchange-based policies this year fall into the 18-34 range, which is a problem from an actuarial/risk pool perspective. Younger people are generally healthier, so the insurance companies prefer to have a higher percentage of them in their risk pools in order to help keep premiums/deductibles from increasing too quickly.
If "almost half" of the 10.5 million uninsured people eligible for the ACA exchanges are in the 18-34 range, that's roughly 5 million young adults who the exchanges need to target.
