New Insurance Carrier Joins Idaho Exchange, Record Number of Plans Available in 2021
Preview plans and prices beginning Oct. 1 at YourHealthIdaho.org
BOISE, Idaho – Your Health Idaho, the state health insurance exchange, announced today that Idahoans will have a record number of medical and dental plans and a new insurance carrier to choose from in 2021.
Regence, which currently sells small group and individual plans off-exchange in Idaho, will offer medical coverage through Your Health Idaho for the first time in 2021. The addition of Regence brings the total number of insurance carriers on the Idaho exchange to seven.
“We are pleased to welcome Regence to Your Health Idaho,” said Pat Kelly, Your Health Idaho Executive Director. “Adding another regional insurance carrier means even more choice for Idahoans and continued local control for the Idaho marketplace.”
Beginning Oct. 1, Idahoans can preview the 136 medical and 13 dental plans that will be available in 2021 online at www.YourHealthIdaho.org.
The data below comes from the GitHub data repositories of Johns Hopkins University, except for Rhode Island, Utah and Wyoming, which come from the GitHub data of the New York Times due to the JHU data being incomplete for these three states. Some data comes directly from state health department websites.
Note that a few weeks ago I finally went through and separated out swing districts. I'm defining these as any county which where the difference between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton was less than 6 percentage points either way in 2016. There's a total of 198 Swing Counties using this criteria (out of over 3,200 total), containing around 38.5 million Americans out of over 330 million nationally, or roughly 11.6% of the U.S. population.
With these updates in mind, here's the top 100 counties ranked by per capita COVID-19 cases as of Saturday, September 26th (click image for high-res version). Blue = Hillary Clinton won by more than 6 points; Orange = Donald Trump won by more than 6 points; Yellow = Swing District
(sigh) Back on August 7th (an eternity ago), the "Big News" of the day was that Donald Trump was supposedly going to "pursue a major executive order requiring health insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions for all of its customers."
As I, and everyone else who has the slightest clue about how health insurance or the law works noted:
THE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT ALREADY REQUIRES HEALTH INSURANCE CARRIERS TO COVER PRE-EXISTING CONDITIONS, AND DONALD TRUMP AND THE REPUBLICAN PARTY ARE CURRENTLY IN FEDERAL COURT TRYING TO STRIKE DOWN THE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT.
ANY reporter/media outlet which reports/tweets about Trump's XO "ordering" insurance companies to "cover pre-existing conditions" without mentioning that THE ACA ALREADY DOES THIS and TRUMP IS SUING TO STRIKE DOWN THE ACA is guilty of journalistic malpractice.
There's a lot to unpack in this press release from Covered California:
Covered California Hits Record Enrollment, Providing Important Lessons for the Nation on Meeting Americans’ Health Care Needs During the Pandemic and Major Economic Downturn
Covered California’s investments in marketing and outreach, along with consumer-first polices, helped it reach a record enrollment of 1.53 million people.
The record enrollment was bolstered by 289,000 people who signed up for coverage during the COVID-19 special-enrollment period, including 21 percent who were previously uninsured and likely ineligible to enroll under federal rules.
That's roughly 61,000 Californians who were able to enroll in ACA exchange policies specifically due to CA having an open SEP (that is, no requirement of coverage loss/etc. to do so).
The Texas Fold'em lawsuit to strike down the ACA (officially called "Texas vs. U.S.", "Texas vs. Azar" or, more recently, "CA vs. TX") is scheduled for oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court on November 10th, 2020...exactly one week after Election Day.
I'm assuming that the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader GInsburg doesn't change the date of the hearing; presumably it will be heard by the 8 other SCOTUS justices or (God help us) by all 9 if Mitch McConnell is able to ram through Trump's appointee in record time (November 10th is just 53 days away).
The data below comes from the GitHub data repositories of Johns Hopkins University, execpt for Rhode Island, Utah and Wyoming, which come from the GitHub data of the New York Times due to the JHU data being incomplete for these three states. Some data comes directly from state health department websites.
A reminder that I made two important changes to the spreadsheet last week:
First, the Johns Hopkins Github archive has finally started breaking out New York City's data into the five separate boroughs/counties
Second, I've finally gone through and separated out swing districts. I'm defining these as any county which where the difference between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton was less than 6 percentage points either way in 2016. There's a total of 198 Swing Counties using this criteria (out of over 3,200 total), containing around 38.5 million Americans out of over 330 million nationally, or roughly 11.6% of the U.S. population.
With these updates in mind, here's the top 100 counties ranked by per capita COVID-19 cases as of Saturday, September 19th (click image for high-res version). Blue = Hillary Clinton won by more than 6 points; Orange = Donald Trump won by more than 6 points; Yellow = Swing District
I'll have much more to say about this, of course, but tonight I'll keep it short.
The Texas Fold'em lawsuit to strike down the ACA (officially called "Texas vs. U.S.", "Texas vs. Azar" or, more recently, "CA vs. TX") is scheduled for oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court on November 10th, 2020...exactly one week after Election Day.
I'm assuming that the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader GInsburg doesn't change the date of the hearing; presumably it will be heard by the 8 other SCOTUS justices or (God help us) by all 9 if Mitch McConnell is able to ram through Trump's appointee in record time (November 10th is just 53 days away).
While Justice Ginsburg's passing under a Trump Presidency should strike terror into everyone's heart for 1,000 other reasons as well, the big fear about the Texas Fold'em case specifically is that it means either a) the ACA is dead if Trump manages to get a replacement on the bench, or b) even if he doesn't, a 4-4 split ruling would result in the case being kicked back down to the lower federal court...which would also mean the law is dead.
I'm not sure what's going on with Bright Health Care in Nebraska. They entered the state's ACA market in 2020, but for whatever reason they aren't showing up in the HealthCare.Gov Rate Review database. The only carrier listed for the state's individual market is Medica, and the SERFF database for Nebraska doesn't bring up either one.
Even more curious, when I ran a search to make sure that Bright hadn't simply jumped in and then out again the following year, I found this article:
Bright Health Plan announced today its 2021 expansion plan. It will expand access to its Medicare Advantage, individual and family-plan products in select areas, and to add fully-insured small business plans to its available products in certain markets.
Me, June 16th, after several months of various state-based ACA exchanges bumping out their COVID-19 Special Enrollment Period deadlines by a month, then another month, then another month:
At a certain point I'm guessing at least one of the state exchanges will just say "screw it" and open 2020 enrollment up for the full year.
The point of a deadline is a) to prevent people from trying to game the system by deliberately waiting until they're sick/injured before enrolling in coverage (thus driving up premiums for everyone else) and b) to goad people into actually taking action (deadlines do have a clear positive impact on enrollment). With the COVID-19 pandemic having thrown the entire healthcare system into disarray, neither of those seem to be much of a factor this year.
I've taken some amount of criticism from people who got the vapors and claimed that I was "politicizing" the pandemic, which is laughable in the Trump era, where everything has been politicized by the Trump Administration.
Six months into the pandemic, the United States continues to suffer the worst outbreak of COVID-19 in the developed world. Considerable blame belongs to a federal response that offloaded responsibility for the crucial task of testing to the states. The irony is that, after assembling the team that came up with an aggressive and ambitious national testing plan, Kushner then appears to have decided, for reasons that remain murky, to scrap its proposal.
