The Alabama House of Representatives on Wednesday narrowly approved a deep cut to the state's Medicaid program as lawmakers continue to deadlock on a solution to the budget shortfall.
The budget cut came out of frustration over the stalemate and is largely seen as a way to build pressure on lawmakers to find some sort of compromise. But opponents called it a dangerous gamble with the health care of the state's most vulnerable people.
Rebecca Santiago clutched a stack of papers about Obamacare and chatted up strangers at the health fair, set up on a Hartford street within view of two homeless shelters. She wanted to know if they had health insurance and, perhaps more importantly, if they’d used it.
One was Darin Zollarcoffer, 48. He had coverage, but no primary care doctor.
IMPORTANT:See this detailed explanation of how I've come up with the following estimated maximum requested weighted average rate increases for this state.
As explained in the first link above, I've still been able to piece together rough estimates of the maximum possible and mid-range requested average rate increase for the North Carolina individual market:
While their reports have always been comprehensive, they were also a bit confusing. Thankfully, starting with their June report, they've made the appropriate data points a bit more obvious. While the QHP selection total is still confusing, the effectuated number (which is really more relevant at this point is the combination of APTC/CSR + non-APTC/CSR enrollees, or 74,583 + 59,617 = 134,200 people as of the end of June.
I was kind of hoping that this morning's Gallup uninsured rate news would include a monthly update for July; instead, it only runs through the end of June, the same quarterly survey results that they released a month ago. Then again, things probably didn't change much in July.
Instead, this time they've broken the numbers out by state:
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Arkansas and Kentucky continue to have the sharpest reductions in their uninsured rates since the healthcare law took effect at the beginning of 2014. Oregon, Rhode Island and Washington join them as states that have at least a 10-percentage-point reduction in uninsured rates.
IMPORTANT:See this detailed explanation of how I've come up with the following estimated maximum requested weighted average rate increases for this state.
As explained in the first link above, I've still been able to piece together rough estimates of the maximum possible and most likely requested average rate increase for the state's individual market:
As noted in the table, the Arizona analysis is even more fuzzy than most other states, because the enrollment/market share estimate for Health Net is a guess. According to their Q2 2015 SEC filing (page 49), Health Net had 69,000 people enrolled in individual policies in Arizona as of 6/30/15. They don't break out grandfathered/transitional policies (I'm assuming about 14% combined), nor do they provide a PPO/HMO split, so I'm just going with 50/50, or 60K total ACA-compliant enrollees.
Not much of a headline, I realize, but I wasn't really sure how else to put it. Thanks to R. Adams Dudley for the link.
JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) just reported a study regarding the impact of the ACA on insurance coverage, access to care and health. Not much for me to add here; most of it has been widely reported by many outlets, including myself, but it's always good to have more supporting evidence of results, especially given the massive sample size (over half a million people!). I've reformatted & cleaned up the quoted section below for clarity, and you'd have to log into a JAMA account for the full report, but this gives the general skinny:
Results:
Among the 507 055 adults in this survey, pre-ACA trends were significantly worsening for all outcomes. Compared with the pre-ACA trends, by the first quarter of 2015, the adjusted proportions who were:
The challenge concerns the Origination Clause, which provides that “[a]ll Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills.” The original idea was to give control over the power to raise revenue to the House, which was thought to be more directly accountable to the people than the Senate, whose members were then selected by state legislatures.
For my latest exclusive piece for healthinsurance.org, I observe that out of nearly 4 hours total of migraine-inducing debate amongst 17 Republican candidates, one topic which was once supposedly the biggest threat to America itself was barely brought up at all...
But the fact that they barely mentioned [Obamacare] at all tonight was far more significant than any questions they might have brought up about it.
Ten Republican presidential hopefuls took to the debate stage last night to prove their conservative bona fides. They swore they'd unravel President Barack Obama's legacy. But there was one place they barely went: repealing Obamacare.
