So far there have been two comprehensive post-Open Enrollment Period reports released. The first was for Washington State, posted a couple of weeks ago; the second was for Massachusetts, posted last week. While both reports were chock full of all sorts of data-nuggety goodness, including updated paid QHP numbers, neither one included one crucial number: How many total QHP selections there have been in each state since Open Enrollment ended in February.
Since today is the official deadline for filing your taxes, I thought it'd be a good time to remind people that if you had to pay the non-coverage tax penalty last year (ie, the "Individual Shared Responsibility Provision"), were (somehow) unaware of it's existence and didn't find out about it until after 2/15/15, you can still enroll in healthcare coverage via the Tax Filing Season Special Enrollment Period (or #ACATaxTime as I put it) as late as April 30th in most states:
As noted above, 3 states aren't offering any sort of tax penalty-specific enrollment period, and 2 other states have different ending deadlines for the SEP: Washington State ends theirs on Friday the 17th, while Vermont is extending theirs all the way out until the end of May.
The ACA is not, by any means, a perfect law. As a single-payer advocate, I find it ironic and a bit absurd that I've received so much praise and attention over the past year and a half for meticulously tracking the enrollment numbers every day...when none of that tracking would even be necessary if we simply shifted to a single-payer healthcare system of some sort. I've made this point before, of course.
Still, the fact remains that the law is generally working, for the most part, and while parts of it are pretty confusing, there are some parts which quite simply aren't. Yes, the law should be as easy to understand as possible. Yes, there are plenty of situations where the government, the insurance companies, the exchange personnel, the brokers/navigators or even the hospitals/doctors are to blame for errors, but I'm not addressing any of those cases here.
However, at the end of the day, the actual enrollees do need to take some bare-minimum level of personal responsibility for their decisions.
Yeah, I know, this is the 3rd off-topic post I've made in as many days, but it's kind of a slow week and I'm procrastinating on my day job at the moment. Besides, this is kind of nagging at me.
Hillary Clinton's new campaign logo (the "Arrow-H" or whatever) has been the subject of way too much discussion already, but I'm a website developer (if not really a graphic designer) so I can get away with it to a point.
The other day I noted that the only major issue I have with it is that mashing the primary red & blue colors up against each other is always problematic because those colors tend to bleed into each other (either literally on a print job or figuratively when you're looking at them). It's not Hillary's fault that the U.S. flag happens to include 2 colors that clash, but it is what it is.
My suggestion was to simply add a thin white border around the arrow to add some space between the blue and red, but I didn't actually do so; here's how that looks, and I think that just this simple tweak improves it tremendously:
Regular readers know that I've been a long-time fan of the Hillary Clinton impersonator (along with a bevy of other celebrities, as well as being a skilled singer & comedienne) Rosemary Watson.
Yesterday, Ms. Watson (who has been praised by Variety, US News & World Report, The Telegraph and none other than the one & only Carol Burnett) launched a new GoFundMe campaign. As she puts it:
This is really the most appropriate response to today's jaw-dropping speculation from UM law professor Nicholas Bagley (who supports the ACA, I should note):
If the Supreme Court rules for the plaintiffs in King v. Burwell, the thirty-four states without their own exchanges will come under immense pressure to create them. But there’s a catch, one that so far has gone unmentioned in the debate over King. Could residents of the states with new state-based exchanges even qualify for subsidies?
I don't have time to do a full write-up this morning (ironically because I have to take my kid to a doctor's appointment), but here's the main takeaway:
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The uninsured rate among U.S. adults declined to 11.9% for the first quarter of 2015 -- down one percentage point from the previous quarter and 5.2 points since the end of 2013, just before the Affordable Care Act went into effect. The uninsured rate is the lowest since Gallup and Healthways began tracking it in 2008.
OK, today's the Big Day; Hillary Clinton has Finally, Officially, For Realz! announced that yes, she is indeed running for President of the United States in 2016.
Everyone's going nuts about it at the moment (even though it's the worst-kept secret in history). I don't have a whole lot to say about my actual feelings about her running/being the nominee yet, and I haven't even watched the launch video yet, but as a website developer, I do have 3 minor gripes and one observation about her all-new campaign website, HillaryClinton.com:
First, the quibbles:
First, while "tooltips" (the little pop-up labels when you roll over something) can be useful for link icons which aren't immediately obvious, they should never be used for text links, especially when the tooltip is exactly the same as the link itself (Iowa / Iowa). It obscures the links below it without providing any useful information.
Second, while translucent overlays can also be very effective, it's a bad idea to do this for drop-down menus, since it tends to make it more difficult to read the drop-down links over the text behind it.
Third (this is more of an "optics" thing), I'm assuming that IA, NH, NY, NV & SC are the first states to hold their primaries. While I can understand listing them first, she probably should have still listed all 50 states (along with DC, Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa & the US Virgin Islands) as well for the whole "reaching out to all Americans" vibe. Grey out the other 45+ links if need be, but list them (double-columned if necessary).
Part of the key to the successful enrollment of over 8 million* people last year and around 12 million* this year in the various ACA exchange policies has been the army of so-called "navigators" or "assisters" who, along with private health insurance brokers, helped educate millions of people about how the exchanges work, what their best options were and how to go through the procedure.
Unfortunately, some states (those run by administrations of a certain crimson hue, shall we say) decided, in their effort to obstruct Obamacare at every possible opportunity, to be utter jackasses by ginning up absurd regulations/restrictions about who "qualified" to be an ACA navigator.
This article about New Hampshire reveals 3 noteworthy bits of information: First, it looks like at least one of the 37 HC.gov states will be reporting their exchange enrollments monthly during the off-season, even if the HHS Dept. itself refuses to do so:
The New Hampshire Insurance Departmentrecently began requiring insurance companies selling plans through the marketplace to submit monthly enrollment numbers.
Second, here's the first results of those monthly reports:
According to the latest numbers, a total of 45,504 people had signed up for plans in New Hampshire by April 1
