UPDATE 2/05/16: Unfortunately, I got swamped this week with the actual enrollment wrap-up stuff and never got a chance to write up the Part II promised at the end of this. I might have to re-think how I do this. I'll leave this post online, but might ot be referencing back to it for awhile longer than I expected. Sorry about that.
Better yet: This, in turn, led to another hostile encounter with another extreme Bernie supporter...a female one in this case, who was off her rocker, which in turn kind of proved Molloy's point about "Bro" not neccessarily having to be male. Additional irony: In both cases, I had actually been attempting to defend, or at least smooth over, the "Bernie Bro" insanity. And so it goes.
In any event, I had made a couple of other mistakes in my original post: While the title of the piece mentioned "siding with Hillary on healthcare", the post itself was really more about a) the problems I have with Bernie's plan and b) my own idea about how to eventually get to a single payer system...not what Hillary's plans actually are. In response, the following day I posted another piece which looked into what Hillary Clinton's ideas on healthcare policy actually are. On the one hand, they're far more detailed than Bernie's, which is a very good thing. On the other hand, even if every one of them were to be fully implemented, they'd significantly improve the current system but no, they still wouldn't bring about either single payer or universal coverage by themselves.
The last Colorado update, which ran through January 15th, had their numbers at 139,579 private policies (QHPs), 23,017 standalone dental plans, 45,100 in Medicaid and 2,771 in the SCHIP program.
I've just learned that Colorado's final tally as of the January 31st deadline stands at 153,583 QHPs, 25,604 dental, 54,447 Medicaid and 3,549 SCHIP, which means they added just over 14,000 in the final 16 days.
Of the estimated 12-13 million people who, in the end, appear to have enrolled in ACA exchange policies for this year, around 10-11 million of them are receiving federal tax credits, either as a monthly subsidy towards their premiums or as a "lump sum" tax rebate the following spring.
Either way, exchange enrollees will have to include two important new forms when filing their federal income taxes this year:
UPDATE 2/04/16: OK, I've confirmed that Covered California will be releasing their numbers at around 1pm4pm this afternoon (whoops...forgot about the time zone difference), while HHS will be holding a call at around 3pm to discuss the Open Enrollment period in general at around 3pm. I don't know if they'll give out just the HealthCare.Gov numbers (38 states) or the national total today, but even if it's HC.gov only, with CoveredCA and the 5 states which have already released their numbers (see below), that'll still be 44 states accounted for representing over 90% of the national total (plus most of the enrollment in the remaining 6 states +DC is already booked as well). Still, I'm pretty sure they'll give the grand total regardless. Stay tuned...
According to Dan Diamond of Politico, the total number won't be released by HHS until Thursday or Friday.
MNsure, the Minnesota ACA exchange, is the first one to report their final, official 2016 Open Enrollment numbers, and they have much to be proud of:
85,390 Minnesotans Enroll in Private Coverage Through MNsure During the 2016 Open Enrollment Period
Enrollment goal exceeded, Minnesota leads the nation in new enrollees
February 01, 2016
ST. PAUL, Minn.—Today, MNsure announced 85,390 Minnesotans enrolled private health insurance coverage through the state exchange during the 2016 open enrollment period, November 1, 2015, through January 31, 2016. MNsure's goal was to enroll 83,000 in private coverage.
In addition, 33,333 Minnesotans newly enrolled in MinnesotaCare and 73,173 newly enrolled in Medical Assistance. MNsure also enrolled 7,144 Minnesotans in a dental-only plan. These numbers are preliminary and are not yet final.
Well, it's around 7pm EST on Sunday, 1/31/16. As of this writing, HealthCare.Gov is loading quickly, as are all 13 of the state-based exchange websites. Aside from a "high call volume" message at Covered California and "extended call center hour" messages from CoveredCA and various other SBMs, I'm not seeing any evidence of website server load strain, etc.
In fact, the only "overtime/extension period" announcements so far are from the Maryland Health Connection and Covered California, which each announced official "In Line By Midnight" extensions for those who start their enrollment process by midnight tonight.
This is only appearing on the home page of the Massachusetts exchange website, but the wording of it suggests that it applies to all of the state-based exchanges.
Yeeks. Don't be surprised if there's a few more #ACAOvertime announcements after all....
UPDATE 10:50pm: Hmmm...it's been over an hour and no other state exchange websites are reporting any problems, nor have I seen any Tweets or Facebook posts which indicate any outages.
All websites including HC.gov are still loading smoothly.
UPDATE MIDNIGHT: Welp, that's that, at least for the Atlantic and Eastern Time Zones. *Central, Mountain West and Pacific still have a bit to go, and of course Alaska and Hawaii are 5 hours behind, but I've gotta get some sleep myself...
I assume there'll be some sort of rough tally announcement tomorrow, but all eyes will be on the Iowa Caucuses anyway, so there you go.
Fox News host Chris Wallace cornered Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz on Sunday about his claim that President Barack Obama’s health care reform law had cost jobs.
“The fact checkers say you’re wrong,” Wallace told Cruz. “Since that law went into effect, the unemployment rate fell from 9.9% to 5% as 13 million new jobs were created, and 16.3 million people who were previously uninsured now have coverage.”
“There are plenty of problems with Obamacare, but more people have jobs and health insurance,” the Fox News host added.
...“Wait,” Wallace interrupted. “There’s certainly no question that more people have jobs and more people health insurance.”
...The Texas senator became irritated as the Fox News host pressed for an answer to his original question.
STEPHANOPOULOS: You say that Ted Cruz is a liar, but you have said that you want everyone to be covered on health care and the government is going to pay for it. How is that not ObamaCare?
TRUMP: I want people takes -- that's true. I want people taken care of. I have a heart. I want people taken care of. If people have no money, we have to help people. But that doesn't mean single payer. It means we have to help people.
STEPHANOPOULOS: How do you do it?
TRUMP: We'll work something out.
And...scene.
(OK, I admit I left out some of Trump's blather before/after; feel free to click the link for his "fully detailed" response).
