Not that anyone's reading today (all eyes are on either Baltimore or the Supreme Court, with good reason), but this is a nice little ancillary benefit of the Affordable Care Act:
Dear Charles,
Thought you'd appreciate this.
Some imposter used my SSN to file a tax return this year, which I found out when I tried to e-file. I've done all the identity theft things, filed my return on paper with the identity theft affidavit from the IRS website, etc. etc. But I wondered whether the fraudster had gotten several thousand dollars out of the Treasury.
Today I got a letter from the IRS, saying they couldn't process my 1040EZ return because it didn't include the Health Insurance tax form, reconciling the subsidy I got (which their computer had matched up with my return) with the credit I was actually entitled to.
I haven't filed a 1040EZ since maybe 1975, so this was obviously the fraudulent return, not my real one. (My real one has the health insurance form on it, of course.) I was delighted that their filter matched ACA information against the return before sending out the refund. I called the IRS to let them know, and will follow up with the IRS in writing to make sure they don't send any refund.
After months of never-ending growth, "Healthy Michigan", aka MI's implementation of the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion provision, has officially stabilized at around 600,000 enrollees:
The reason it's bobbling around the 600K mark, of course, is because of normal "churn" as people move onto/off of the program as they gain/lose jobs, move into/out of the state, give birth/lose family members and so forth.
A few days ago, YouGov.com posted the results of their own survey about the ACA, which showed pretty much exactly the same results as both the Bloomberg News and Kaiser Family Foundation polls released last week: Obamacare still isn't exactly beloved, but acceptance/approval of the law has been gradually (if grudgingly) increasing ever since the ugly rollout of the ACA exchanges a year and a half ago:
I didn't bother posting about this poll because it seemed a bit redundant; all 3 surveys asked questions in different ways, but the results are pretty consistent across the board.
Here's a conundrum for today's Florida Republicans: You love tax cuts and hospital corporations while hating education and poor people.
You're all set to slash taxes (again) while also giving hospitals $1.3 billion from the federal government to reimburse them for losses they incur from treating poor people who can't afford to pay their bills.
At the same time, you're kind of a huge jerk, so you refused to expand Medicaid to over 800,000 of your residents, even though you won't have to pay a dime for the first 3 years, a few percent for the next few years and no more than 10% of the cost after that.
The Supreme Court rules that you don't have to do so, so you get to spend a couple of years laughing in the face of 800K low-income people while simultaneously rubbing the Obama Administration's nose in your ass-jackery.
Finally, the HHS Dept. decides to fight back by threatening to pull that $1.3B away from your hospitals unless you play ball.
Suddenly, you're in a bind. If you cave, then terrible things will happen: 800,000 people will receive decent healthcare coverage and you'll be found guilty by your fellow Republicans of having a soul. The Horror! Can't have THAT happen!!
I live in Michigan, but I've never heard of Patrick Colbeck. All I know about him is that he wrote an Op-Ed piece for the Detroit News on Friday which has more factual holes than the swiss cheese I put on my turkey sandwich last week:
Obamacare’s days are numbered. Either the Supreme Court will strike it down via rulings on cases like King v. Burwell, it will be repealed in 2017, or it will implode on itself taking the health of many of our citizens with it.
A couple of days ago, the editiorial board of the News posted an editorial which correctly calls for the renewal of Healthy Michigan, which requires a federal waiver once a year (I think) in order to continue because it includes modifications from simply increasing the eligibility threshold to 138% of the Federal Poverty Level.
Just a quick reminder: The tax filing season special enrollment period is still going on for 1 more week 1 more day in 45 states (+DC), and all the way until the end of May in Vermont:
To date, there have been at least 106,000 confirmed QHP selections specifically due to the #ACATaxTime SEP:
California's insurance commissioner criticized healthcare giant Anthem Blue Cross for imposing an "excessive" rate increase on nearly 170,000 customers statewide.
Dave Jones said Wednesday that Anthem had failed to justify its 9% average rate hike that took effect April 1. Premiums are going up as much as 25% for about 4,000 policyholders.
"These rate hikes have real financial impact on Californians," Jones said. "It means less money for other essentials like food, clothing, housing and education."
But state officials have no power to stop health insurance rate increases that are deemed unreasonable.
Jones lost his bid to change that last fall when Californians rejected the Proposition 45 rate-regulation measure by a wide margin.
Satisfaction with the Health Insurance Marketplace exchange enrollment process among new enrollees has significantly increased from 2014, and health plans obtained through the Marketplace exchange generate levels of member satisfaction equal to or higher than plans not obtained through the Marketplace exchange, according to the J.D. Power 2015 Health Insurance Marketplace Exchange Shopper and Re-Enrollment (HIX) StudySM released today.
For months now, whenever I've crunched the numbers to figure out how many people would be screwed by an adverse King v. Burwell ruling by the Supreme Court (answer: around 6-7 million directly, plus another 6-7 million indirectly), I've always made sure to include one caveat: A small percent at the upper range of the federal subsidy range wouldn't really be impacted much:
Assuming that NM, OR & NV are "in the clear" for federal subsidies (and this still isn't clear), you'd have to subtract around 175K from the total; call it 6.5 million who would actually lose their federal tax credits.
Of those, let's assume that perhaps 5% are at the upper end of the tax credit limit and are therefore only receiving nominal credits (say, $30 or less per month). For those folks, losing these credits, in and of itself, would be annoying but hardly devastating; I have to imagine they won't drop their coverage if that was the only change (which it isn't, but I'll get to that in a moment).
However, I was just spitballing that 5%; I didn't do the actual math to see just how many people at various income levels would be seriously hurt. Fortunately, over at the Huffington Post, Jeffrey Young has done exactly that:
