Beneficiaries with Healthy Michigan Plan Coverage: 424,852
(Includes beneficiaries enrolled in health plans and beneficiaries not required to enroll in a health plan.)
*Statistics as of October 20, 2014
*Updated every Monday at 3 p.m.
Obviously this is fantastic news; the state is up to 88% of the 477,000 Michiganders estimated to be eligible for the program.
However, when you add in the 213,000 residents of Michigan who are receiving tax credits via private healthcare policies through the Affordable Care Act...aka "Obamacare"...that's around 638,000 people who would lose their coverage if the Republican Party were to successfully repeal the law, which they've been dead-set on doing for 4 years now.
Last week I announced that I've started writing occasional pieces for HealthInsurance.org. Today they've published my 2nd entry, which is all about Kentucky, Mitch McConnell and the real-world impact on hundreds of thousands of people that repealing the ACA would have.
UPDATE:In my story, I noted that the Federal Government is picking up 100% of the tab for the expanded Medicaid enrollees for the first 3 years, and then thought that it dropped down to 90% for another 6 years, and then to the normal fed/state split after that (70/30 in the case of Kentucky).
Thanks to David M. for bringing to my attention this correction: The expansion program is an even better deal for the states than I thought, because apparently the Federal share only drops to 90% permanently (well, unless a future Congress messes around with that provision of the ACA, of course).
Things may be slowing down, but some people are still enrolling in 2014 QHPs just 1 month before the 2015 enrollment period opens; 162 Minnesotans from 10/8 - 10/16. In addition, Medicaid/MinnesotaCare has jumped by over 7,000 people:
latest enrollment numbers
October 16, 2014
Health Coverage Type Cumulative Enrollments
Medical Assistance 224,891
MinnesotaCare 77,612
Qualified Health Plan (QHP) 55,451
TOTAL 357,954
There's been a lot of fuss made about 2015 ACA exchange premium rates not being available at Healthcare.Gov until after the election. The presumption, of course, is that this is being done for political reasons. While this may be true, it could also simply be that there's a lot of different policy figures to plug into the federal system, and some states haven't even finalized their rates yet.
That being said, residents of some states can check out the 2015 premiums now and compare them against their current premium:
IDAHO: Idaho is the only state moving from HC.gov to their own exchange. Idaho residents can check out their 2015 rates directly via the state exchange site.
This is absolutely awesome...and extremely frustrating at the same time. Dan Goldberg and his chums at CNY have put together another extremely detailed breakdown of ACA enrollments in New York City, with QHPs, Medicaid and CHIP enrollees sorted out by individual zip code (a pretty herculean task given how many zip codes there are in NYC). Even more interesting (from my perspective, anyway) is that they've managed to get the current enrollment figures--updated through September. Since the NY exchange pointedly informed me back in June that they had no plans to release updated enrollment figures during the off-season at all, this is a huge development from my POV.
The only problem, of course, is that this map only gives the tally for NYC itself (about 8.4 million people total) not the rest of the state (about 19.6 million). Since my data is focused on the state-level numbers, this is frustrating; so close, and yet so far. I suppose I could extrapolate the numbers by multiplying each by 2.3x, but that doesn't work because the demographics are so vastly different between the two.
Anyway, for NYC itself, there's gobs of data-nuggety goodness to be found:
Regular readers may recall my thorough debunking of Sharyll Attkisson's ludicrous claim that only 3.4 million people out of the "38 million" who are "eligible for coverage under Obamacare" have actually received healthcare coverage since the law went into effect.
As I noted, these numbers were just a wee bit off. The "3.4 million" is actually more like "11.8 million", and while the "38 million" is actually reasonably close if you're only including those who were a) uninsured last year and b) who qualify for either Medicaid or tax credits via the ACA exchanges (more like 36.4 million), even this is stupid because no one in the Obama administration, HHS, CMS or the CBO ever claimed that all 36.4 million would be insured in the first year of the exchanges.
Research has shown that consumers "do think there is a difference," between for-profit and not-for-profit health plans, says the head of an industry group. But in the final rule on health insurance exchanges, CMS has declined to require that tax-status be disclosed.
Nonprofit health insurance plans continue to dominate customer satisfaction and quality lists, and they want consumers to know about it.
Bruce McPherson, president and CEO of the Alliance for Advancing Nonprofit Health Care, says federal and state health insurance exchanges should do more to make the tax status of health plans readily available to consumers.
And this is kind of important, because at the same time...
Colorado’s 2.0 “Kentucky-style” system that is supposed to simplify the way people get health insurance won’t be ready until days before the Nov. 15 open enrollment starts.
And as Colorado’s health exchange enters its busy season, a third “chief” has announced she’s leaving Connect for Health Colorado. Chief Executive Patty Fontneau departed in August. Chief Financial Officer Cammie Blais left two weeks ago. And Chief Operating Officer Lindy Hinman announced her resignation and plans to leave next month after open enrollment begins.
A provision of the Affordable Care Act precluding health insurers or companies in the “same controlled group of corporations” as a health insurer from holding exchange contracts raises questions about Optum working on Vermont Health Connect.
Concerns regarding Optum were raised at the federal level by Sens. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, the ranking members of the Finance and Judiciary committees respectively.
Basically just an overview of the new Idaho ACA exchange; ID is the only state moving from HC.gov to their own website for the 2nd year, giving them a unique perspective. Most interesting to me is that they're spinning the "autonomy/states-rights" angle, which was the whole reason for pushing states to set up their own exchanges in the first place:
CLARKSTON, WA – Leaders with Washington’s Health Care Exchange are preparing for the second open enrollment period, but at the same time they are still working on resolving billing and computer problems for 1,300 accounts from the first sign-up period.
This is very confusingly worded, because it makes it sound like all 3 companies have been operating on the HC.gov exchange when it turns out that only 2 of them have. Wellmark did not participate in the ACA exchange; the 19,000 customers referred to here have off-exchange policies which are still ACA-compliant:
Commissioner Nick Gerhart said today that he has approved premium increases from Wellmark Blue Cross and Blue Shield, CoOportunity Health and Coventry Health.
