Things have been changing rapidly in the ongoing Health Republic of New York saga, and as recently as last night each development seemed to make the situation worse...but a few hours ago, Politco New York reporter Dan Goldberg posted a new story which indicates that the powers that be finally have some positive news:
In an effort to head off a potential health insurance disaster, state officials on Sunday announced a series of steps to protect roughly 200,000 customers who are set to lose their health coverage, and promised to investigate the company behind the crisis.
...And those were just the customers who were aware of the change. No one could say for certain how many were unaware they were about to lose their coverage, and other insurers operating on the exchange expressed concern that the customers most likely to pick a new plan were the ones most likely to be sick, a scenario of adverse selection that few companies were prepared to handle.
Last year, to my everlasting joy, the HHS Dept. finally started issuing not just big, bulky monthly ACA exchange enrollment reports but also began issuing simple weekly enrollment "Snapshot" reports, giving just the "top line" number of people who had selected Qualified Health Plans (QHPs) in the preceding week. The first few weeks they only gave out the national total, but a few weeks in they started breaking it out by state (and, eventually, even by major metropolitan areas).
The irony here is that if they had started doing exactly this in the first place back in 2013 (just the QHP tally per state on a weekly basis, nothing more than that) I almost certainly never would have bothered tracking ACA enrollments myself, and thus this website/project never would have started at all.
For the third time around, I'm guessing the President has something similar in store for the final lap in mid-January (remember, the deadline is 1/31/16 this year), but to kick things off, he's annouced an interesting new promotional effort:
White House launches Obamacare sign-up competition
As open enrollment season on HealthCare.gov begins, President Obama is introducing a contest meant to motivate Americans to sign up for health insurance coverage through federal and state exchanges.
IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER: I COULD BE COMPLETELY WRONG ABOUT THIS OPTION.
Just this morning I posted some significant updates in the ongoing, increasingly messy saga of Health Republic of New York, one of the ACA-created Co-Ops which is being shut down due to severe financial issues (partly due to the Risk Corridor Massacre debacle, but other reasons as well).
Once again, the short version is:
Most of the Co-Ops which are being shut down are at least able to cover their policies through the end of December, giving their current enrollees plenty of time to shop around and switch to a different insurance carrier. This was supposed to be the case for Health Republic of NY as well.
However, on October 30th, there was a surprise announcement by the NY Dept. of Financial Services (which includes insurance regulation) that instead of December 31st, the HRoNY policies are being yanked effective November 30th. Furthermore, current enrollees have only until November 15th to find a replacement to tide them over for December.
While one month may not sound like a big deal, it's a huge problem for at least some of the 200,000-odd people currently enrolled via HRoNY (note: I thought this number was down to 166K, but may be mistaken about the figure).
It's a major problem for some enrollees who are undergoing chemotherapy, for instance, or have other recurring medical services/treatments (many of which are expensive) which can't be "paused" for 31 days.
I wrote a couple of posts last week about the ongoing Health Republic of New York Co-Op meltdown, which has quickly gone from being just-another-Co-Op-closure to a complete disaster for up to 166,000 New York residents, primarily because unlike the other Co-Ops which are at least covering their existing enrollees through the end of December, Health Republic is now having the plug pulled out at the end of November, which gives current enrollees just 8 days to scramble to find new coverage for the last month of 2015.
This was made worse by the fact that the November 30 cut-off wasn't even announced until October 30, and even then, the powers that be in the NY Dept. of Insurance, NY State of Health exchange and Health Republic itself didn't appear to treat this development with any particular sense of urgency. I mean yes, they posted notices about it and supposedly sent out letters to all 166,000 people, but an awful lot of those people didn't appear to have received those notices as of a few days ago. Hell, until a day or two ago the NY State of Health website didn't even have anything posted about the 11/30 cut-off at all.
Well, I've been screaming bloody murder about the situation, as have others, and it seems to be getting some butts moving...but I'm not sure how helpful any of it will be.
Unlike the federal exchange (HealthCare.gov) and many of the state-based exchanges which have experienced massive technical problems to some degree or another over the past two years (Oregon, Nevada and Hawaii have gone kaput; Massachusetts & Maryland had to be completely rebuilt; Vermonts is still iffy), the Kentucky ACA exchange website, aka "kynect" (lower-case intentional), has been chugging along smoothly since Day One on October 1, 2013. It's fully self-sufficient, well known and trusted by Kentuckians, and has been an amazingly successful venture in general.
Speaking in his first public comments since he was elected governor of Kentucky on Tuesday, Matt Bevin repeated his pledge to dismantle kynect, the state’s health insurance exchange that has been hailed as a national model.
“My intent is to have it wound down by the end of next year,” Bevin said of the online service people use to shop for health coverage or determine whether they are eligible for Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act.
NOTE: I am very much aware that simply "mashing up" 2 different surveys and splitting the difference is not a statistically professional way to do this, but it's the best I can do for the moment.
Back in July, after Gallup released their quarterly survey finding the U.S. uninsured rate to have dropped to 11.4% for adults 18 and older, I posted a more detailed graph which also separated out people caught in the Medicaid Gap as well as uninsured Undocumented Immigrants (who aren't eligible for either the ACA exchanges or Medicaid/CHIP, except for children in California...and I presume the new CA law doesn't start until January). Here's what the chart looked like at the time:
Health insurance premiums will increase on average 7 percent in Colorado in 2016, according to statistics compiled by the state division that reviewed and approved plans for the coming year.
...Consumers who purchased through Connect for Health Colorado, the state health insurance exchange, in 2015 who aren’t eligible for tax credits will see an average increase of 12 percent if they simply renew their current plan for 2016.
Look, the later part of the article talks about the form in question itself, IRS Form 8962, being overly complicated, and perhaps it is. It's 2 pages, and while it's certainly not as bad as some other federal tax forms, I can definitely see it being intimidating to those who are used to just filling out the 1040-EZ form, as I did years ago. Comic strips and sitcoms have used the "Taxes Are Hard!!" meme as comedic fodder for decades. So no, I'm not going to berate anyone complaining about the form being difficult to fill out.
HOWEVER, complaining about having to file a tax return AT ALL? You're receiving thousands of dollars in tax credits and you didn't think you'd have to fill out a tax form in order to prove your eligibility?
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The uninsured rate among U.S. adults aged 18 and older was 11.4% in the second quarter of 2015, down from 11.9% in the first quarter. The uninsured rate has dropped nearly six percentage points since the fourth quarter of 2013, just before the requirement for Americans to carry health insurance took effect.
...Again, it's safe to assume that this has gone down as well, although probably not as dramatically as for adults. A similar 36.7% drop would be around 2.2 million children (taking population increase into effect), but even half of that would still lop a good million children off the uninsured tally...or an additional 0.3% of the total population.
In other words, it's likely that the actual uninsured rate for the entire U.S. population (all 320 million of us) is down to around 28 million adults + 4.9 million children, around 33 million total...or 10.3% of the entire population.
