So, as Dylan Scott at TPM noted yesterday (and as I noted in kind), the Census Bureau is expected to release a Big Report at 10am with insurance coverage data. However, it turns out that the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) beat them to the punch by releasing their own report at midnight:
Obamacare cut the share of people in the U.S. without health insurance by two percentage points this year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a report today.
In the first three months of 2014, 18.4 percent of adults under age 65 lacked health insurance, down from 20.4 percent last year, according to the CDCsurvey. The fall in the uninsured rate was helped by 3.7 million people who bought private health insurance sold under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the CDC said.
So, here's the big news from CMS/HHS today: Remember the 966,000 people whose citizenship/immigration data didn't match up last May? Well, they've managed to resolve about 851,000 of those cases, yay! Also, remember the 1.2 million households with discrepancies regarding their income levels? Well, that represented about 1.6 million actual people, and they're reporting having resolved about 897,000 households, leaving around 279K to go (representing 363,000 individuals).
Assuming these numbers don't overlap (and they probably do in a few cases), that means CMS has worked through about 2.088 million data discrepancies, leaving around 478K to go. So...yay, team and all that.
As for those who remain, the 115K with immigrant/citizenship status issues need to send their correct documentation to Healthcare.Gov by the end of September to avoid losing coverage. They did say that there would be some sort of special enrollment period for those folks as long as they keep paying their premiums, but they were pretty clear about the September 30th deadline.
At 10 a.m. Tuesday, the Census Bureau will release a new report on health insurance in America.
...The problem with the new numbers, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation's Larry Levitt, is that the Census Bureau's survey cuts off at March 31. That means 3 million people-plus who signed up in the law's final weeks of enrollment will still count as uninsured, even though they have since been covered.
"I think it’s fair to say tomorrow’s release will be essentially meaningless in judging the effects of the Affordable Care Act," Levitt told TPM in an email.
(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.)
3. December 2013: "Hah! They'll never break a million!!"
...that is, until the Christmas/New Years spike, which brought the total enrollee figure up to over 2.1 million.
4. January 2014: "OMG!! 5 GAZILLION POLICIES WERE CANCELLED!!"
...which actually turned out to be only around 1-2 million people at most, the vast majority of which (including myself) simply swapped out their old policies for new ones.
As an aside, I also question the wisdom of not requiring everyone to re-enroll each year. Obviously HHS is trying to minimize the inconvenience/hassle factor, but it seems to me that this is just going to cause even greater confusion than it would if they simply issued a blanket statement: If you enrolled via an ACA exchange, you have to renew once a year even if nothing else has changed.
I don't see doing this as a big deal; people have to renew their license plates every year even if it's for the same car, for example.
"We get into a very dangerous situation if we just tell everybody they can just auto-enroll," Houchens said.
Again, all of this is avoidable. These are the risks of auto-renewal. Anyone who goes back in to HealthCare.gov to get a new eligibility determination will see their updated subsidy as well as the current list of available plans.
I'm about to show you a chart which demonstrates several noteworthy things about QHP enrollment in Oregon (which, in spite of the terrible technical problems their site has had, has managed to enroll a similar ratio of their uninsured residents in private policies (around 34%) via their exchange to Kentucky, which is considered one of the most successful exchanges).
First, here's the latest numbers, as of 4 days ago:
September 10, 2014
Update: Private coverage and Oregon Health Plan enrollment through Cover Oregon
Medical enrollments through Cover Oregon: 353,454 Total private medical insurance enrollments through Cover Oregon: 101,092
Oregon Health Plan enrollments through Cover Oregon: 252,362*
*OHP enrollment data is current as of August 13, 2014. An updated number will be posted soon.
Dental enrollments
Total private dental insurance enrollments through CoverOregon 1: 20,686
Net enrollments Net private medical: 78,616
Net private dental: 14,603
1 Total numbers are the number of enrollments that have occurred through Cover Oregon.
Last week I noted that the "OMG!! GAZILLIONS OF POLICIES CANCELLED!!!" freakout over non-ACA compliant healthcare policies being sunsetted to be replaced by policies which are compliant with the law is about to raise its ugly head again this fall. Sure enough, we're off and running in Virginia:
After a year’s reprieve, up to 250,000 Virginians will receive notice by the end of November that their health insurance plans will be canceled because the plans do not comply with the Affordable Care Act and accompanying state law.
The affected policyholders were allowed to renew their old plans late last year, even though the plans did not provide all of the benefits required under the health care law, but they won’t have that option when the policies expire this year.
I went with 240K instead of 250K because later in the article it says:
OK, I admit that aside from tracking the actual enrollee numbers, I don't know a whole lot about the inner workings of Medi-Cal, California's version of Medicaid. However, if accurate, this just sounds...wrong:
I posted a diary here on August 26 about California turning Medi-Cal into a long term loan for recipients aged 55+ by billing their estates after they die for all of their Medi-Cal expenses. The bureaucrats call that “estate recovery.” I call it legal theft. A bill to remedy this situation and protect low income property owners has unanimously passed the California legislature. The bill has now gone to the governor to be signed. But he is planning to veto it!
Today, many organizations are jointly sponsoring a call-in to the governor's office to put pressure on Governor Brown to sign SB 1124. More information about the call-in is at the bottom of this diary. But first, some background information.
Three important pieces of information about Nevada's exchange out of this article:
1. NV's move to HC.gov will be permanent. The original plan was to only move to the federal exchange for 2015, then moving back to their own (2nd attempt) platform for 2016, which frankly always sounded a bit silly to me. There were lots of reasons for the states to run their own exchanges originally (federal cash to do so, autonomy/local control, etc.), but the federal funding will have dried up by then, and if everything is running smoothly at HC.gov, I'm not sure I see the point in uprooting the whole system at that point. Frankly, there's really only one major reason I could see to move back to their own platform, but...
2. While NV will be using the HC.gov software platform, they'll still legally be considered a state-run exchange, which means that they're safe from any potential SCOTUS Halbig/King fallout. This is basically the entire point I was making way back on July 2nd with my "Domain and a Splashpage" solution.
Without an Obamacare critic to talk to, Klepper turned to a nurse who lost her free clinic job because her patients could finally get health coverage. And she was thrilled about that turn of events. Now, she told him, she was focusing her efforts on other causes, like human trafficking.
“‘Obamacare Forces Nurse into Sex-Slave Trade,’” Klepper said, imagining the headline. “That is great!”
