Of course, when you throw in the missing tax season SEP / off-season enrollments, the actual total should be closer to 12.4 million or higher, and should finally reach my personal Open Enrollment Period target of 12.5 million by the end of May.
Well, it's a week later, and I'm feeling confident enough (especially with the support of new data out of California) to state that the actual total number should indeed have passed the 12.5 million mark nationally sometime over Memorial Day weekend (or today at the latest, since most exchanges were closed for the holiday).
One of the Big ACA Stories today is Robert Pear's piece in the New York Times about the origin/history of the infamous "...established by the state" wording in the Affordable Care Act which is at the heart of the impending King v. Burwell Supreme Court decision (now just 1 month away from the expected announcement):
...The answer, from interviews with more than two dozen Democrats and Republicans involved in writing the law, is that the words were a product of shifting politics and a sloppy merging of different versions. Some described the words as “inadvertent,” “inartful” or “a drafting error.” But none supported the contention of the plaintiffs, who are from Virginia.
Pear goes on to interview and quote various former/current members of Congress and their staff--both Democrats and Republicans alike--all of whom give the same response:
It appears that after the tragic Amtrak derailment a couple of weeks ago, a Philadelphia-based personal injury attorney named Chad Boonswang (allegedly) decided to send out hand-written "sympathy cards" to the families of not just one, but at least two different victims. The "sympathy cards" actually contain no words of sympathy, but instead are crass ads pushing his litigation services at a discounted rate. What a bargain!!
Adding insult to injury, at least one of the victims and their families happen to be Jewish, making the embossed cross on the outside of the card doubly tacky.
In other words, every one of the following states--along with the other 2 dozen not already running their own exchanges--should be running, not walking towards at least getting their ducks in a row in case SCOTUS lowers the boom...and instead, every damned one of them appears to have decided to twiddle their thumbs for the next 6 months or so.
Anyway, let's suppose that #1 and #2 are squared away. Against all odds, the Republican governors and legislators of these states get their heads out of their asses and actually approve all of the above.
That leaves #3: Time. Even if everything was streamlined and fast-tracked (and lord knows that's unlikely), it would still take substantial amounts of time to do all of this.
5. Does the rate change reflect how many people switched policies and/or companies?
Number 4 is easy: NO. None of the requested rate changes that you're seeing flying around right now (and will continue to for the next few weeks) have been approved yet. This could dramatically change some of the final rates.
As I’ve noted before, Republicans may try to pass a temporary patch for the subsidies, packaged with something like the repeal of the individual mandate, in hopes of drawing a presidential veto — so Republicans can then try to blame Obama for failing to fix the problem.
A few days ago, in my latest exclusive for healthinsurance.org, I listed 4 important questions to ask before freaking out about the Scary Rate Increase Headlines® which have started popping up in the news for some states. However, I forgot about a fifth one, which I hinted at yesterday in my analysis of the new Kaiser Family Foundation survey:
Bear in mind that "shopping around" doesn't necessarily mean that you switch policies, it just means that you at least looked around to see what was available.
The whole theory behind the "invisible hand of the free market = lower prices for all" mindset is that competition allows the consumer to shop around and compare pricing and other factors. However, the "competition = lower prices" theory only works if the customers actually do shop around. This year only 30% did, which is either unimpressive or impressive depending on your perspective.
Jeffrey Toobin is a very smart man. He's a staff writer at The New Yorker and has been CNN's legal analyst for many years.
That doesn't mean he's correct about everything, however...and in fact, he made a very obvious, very significant factual error in his King v. Burwell opinion piece this morning, "Obama's Game of Chicken with the Supreme Court".
The main thrust of the piece is that if the Supreme Court does rule in favor of the plaintiffs in King v. Burwell and does make the IRS stop issuing federal tax credits to millions of people enrolled in private healthcare policies via the federal exchange, most people will blame President Obama and the Democratic Party for the fallout rather than the Republicans in Congress and their conservative think tank allies who brought the lawsuit, financed the lawsuit, cheered on the lawsuit and, most importantly, are refusing to take 5 minutes out of their day to "fix" the supposed "problem" in the language of the law.
According to the new report, they've had a total of 117,024 QHP selections since then (through May 10th), including #ACATaxTime enrollments:
Add them together and you get 1,529,224 total QHP selections to date (well, as of 5/10, anyway).
One interesting side note: CA's final #ACATaxTime tally turned out to be nearly 10,000 higher than expected (they previously reported around 33K with just a couple of days to go in the special enrollment period; apparently a lot of people jumped in at the last second after all)
On the surface, aside from the extra 10K for #ACATaxTime, that doesn't sound too interesting...I already had CA down with 1,503,200 QHPs, so this is just 26,024 higher. Big deal, right?
Except for one thing: I've confirmed that the number below represents actual paid, effectuated enrollments as of March 2015:
