On the one hand, Washington State, like Oregon, has a nifty, easy-to-use web-based searchable database for their 2016 rate request filings, yay!
On the other hand, when you get into the details, some of it can be pretty confusing stuff. In 2014, there were 8 companies approved for the WA exchange. For 2015, there were 10 companies, plus 2 more which didn't make the cut. For 2016, a total of 17 companies/subsidiaries have requested approval to sell on the individual market. There's no guarantee that all 17 will be approved to sell in the state, but I'm assuming they all will be for the time being.
There's actually 18 listings, however, because Lifewise split their policies into two entries...one of which is "grandfathered" policies only, and is therefore not relevant for the table below...although this does answer the question "how many people are sill enrolled in Grandfathered policies in Washington State?" The answer appears to be just 15,677 people...out of 343,348 total in the individual market, or only 4.5% of the total.
Since I made such a fuss over Colbeck's jaw-dropping laundry list of factual errors and omissions, I figure it behooves me to give the same scrutiny to the follow-up from a "union boss". Let's take a look:
They said it wouldn’t work.
They said no one wanted it.
They said it would destroy the economy.
They said it would create chaos in the healthcare industry and cause masses of people to lose their insurance.
They said no one would sign up for it; especially healthy and young people.
They even said it would lead to “death panels” deciding who will live or die under Obamacare.
From "It'll Destroy America!!" to "It Doesn't Suck But It Will Someday!" in 10 Easy Steps
1. October 2013: "No one can enroll!!"
(ok, this one is a gimme; the technical mess at HC.gov and some of the state exchanges did make it almost impossible for anyone to sign up the first month.)
Just as House lawmakers were putting together their annual “trains” — cramming multiple, tangentially related bills into hundreds of pages of amendments so they could pass them all at the 11th hour — a funny thing happened. They upped and quit.
On April 27, House Speaker Steve Crisafulli prematurely banged his gavel, ending the session, leaving the Senate holding the bag on this year’s biggest, most contentious issue: Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act. Now a group of Senate Democrats has sued the GOP-dominated House, and as of this writing, the Florida Supreme Court says the lower chamber must explain its abrupt adjournment.
In a nutshell, the House doesn’t want Medicaid expansion but the Senate does. The upper chamber has a nifty non-Medicaid name for it, too. The Florida Health Insurance Exchange (or FHIX) is, in name, an attempt to help GOP senators get past the program’s unpalatable association with “Obamacare.”
OK, I just got this and it just went live, so I'm just now reading it as I'm typing this...call it "liveblogging" if you will...(Update 6:00pm: OK, pretty much done now)
4 p.m., ET, Wednesday
May 6, 2015
STUDY FINDS HEALTH COVERAGE GROWS UNDER AFFORDABLE CARE ACT
Insurance coverage has increased across all types of insurance since the major provisions of the federal Affordable Care Act took effect, with a total of 16.9 million people becoming newly enrolled through February 2015, according to a new RAND Corporation study.
Researchers estimate that from September 2013 to February 2015, 22.8 million Americans became newly insured and 5.9 million lost coverage, for a net of 16.9 million newly insured Americans.
Among those newly gaining coverage, 9.6 million people enrolled in employer-sponsored health plans, followed by Medicaid (6.5 million), the individual marketplaces (4.1 million), nonmarketplace individual plans (1.2 million) and other insurance sources (1.5 million).
...it could actually be several hundred dollars lower.
A week ago I posted a story in which I busted Michigan State Senator Patrick Colbeck for blatantly spewing nonsense numbers about the ACA in an Op-Ed in the Detroit News.
Yesterday, my follow-up story, about the Detroit News allowing Colbeck to go back in and correct some (but not all) of his insanely false factual garbage a solid 10 days later (while failing to give any indication about just how absurdly wrong he had been in the first place) went viral, generating more visitors than any other story I've posted in months.
After an all-day saga, the end result was that the Detroit News finally posted a "correction" notice...except they did so in such a disingenous way (and so long after the original editorial was publshed) as to be nearly meaningless.
I actually missed this report a few days ago, partially because I thought the February report had already been released a few weeks back; it turns out I was thinking of January's.
For January I overshot the mark a bit, but for February my projections were pretty much bang-on target, with an net incrase of 12.65 million Medicaid/CHIP enrollees to date thanks to the ACA. But wait, you're saying: The report says the net gain is only 11.7 million!
Yes, that's true...except that the 11.7 million figure only includes ACA-enabled Medicaid/CHIP additions since expansion started on 1/1/14:
Hartford, Conn. (May 5, 2015) – Access Health CT (AHCT) today announced that they enrolled 1,429 Connecticut residents during the Special Open Enrollment Period which began April 1, 2015 and ended April 30, 2015. The special enrollment period was open to individuals who did not have health care coverage in 2014 and were subject to a penalty on their 2014 federal taxes.
It's important to bear in mind that this number specifically does not include "normal" off-season QHP enrollees via marriage, birth, job loss and so forth.
1,429 over 30 days = about 48 per day. My final estimate of 3,000/day nationally would scale down to just 28/day for Connecticut specifically based on their Open Enrollment Period percentage, so this is actually pretty good.
NOTE: A few days ago there were 2 ACA-related stories which caused me some concern: The initial 2016 rate request filings out of Oregon and a new report from Standard & Poors which seems to indicate troubled waters ahead for ACA-compliant policy premiums. Unfortunately, a lot of this stuff goes way over my head. Fortunately, actuary Rebecca Stob has offered to explain why there's more (or possibly less) than meets the eye in the S&P report:
Disclaimer: I am an actuary at Group Health Cooperative in Seattle WA - this represents my personal opinion and not that of Group Health.
Just over 1 year ago I posted a long, rambling entry which boiled down to: A bunch of thank-yous to those who helped get me through Year One; a reminder that I never intended this project to continue past the 2014 Open Enrollment period; and a committment to keeping the site, blog, graph and spreadsheets cranking along through Year Two as well.
Now that we're past the official 2015 Open Enrollment period (#OE2), the "In Line by Midnight" overtime period (#ACAOvertime and the Tax Filing Season Special Enrollment Period (#ACATaxTime), it's time for me to finally let folks know what my plans are for the site for Year Three.
