One is about Ted "Joseph McCarthy Lookalike/Soundalike" Cruz being "hypocritical" by enrolling the ACA himself (this is mildly amusing, but people comply with laws they personally oppose all the time, so I'm not really making hay out of this one).
In any event, there you have it. IF the other 2/3 of the states follow similar retention patterns to the 1/3 I have data for, the current number enrolled in exchange QHPs as of this writing should be somewhere between 6.8 - 7.0 million people.
Remember how I made 6.8 million the low end of that range in the interest of caution because HHS had previously insisted that the August effectuated enrollment number was 7.3 million?
So, the big ACA data report of the day is the Kaiser Family Foundation's report about 2014 federal tax credit reconciliation--that is, they've issued a big report filled with number-crunchy goodness regarding how many people qualified for "Advanced Premium Tax Credits" last year (aka APTC, aka "Federal Tax Subsidies"), how much they overpaid, how much they underpaid and so on. Lots of good stuff here.
The major takeaway (judging from my Twitter feed, anyway) seems to be one particular point: About 50% of those who received the tax credits underestimated their incomes to the point that they have to pay back an average of $794 per household (important: That's per household, not per individual enrollee).
Now, the other major news here is that 45% of APTC recipients overestimated their incomes by a similar amount, meaning that they'll receive an additional little windfall of around $773 per household, which is awesome for those folks.
OK, it's important to stress that this may not mean anything. Perhaps Justice Kennedy was just in a crabby mood at the time, or perhaps it's an indication of his thinking at the moment but he'll change his mind between now and the June decision announcement (the way that Justice Roberts supposedly did a few years ago in the NFIB case (the one where they upheld the law but shot down mandatory Medicaid expansion). Or, perhaps Kennedy will side with the plaintiffs, but Justice Roberts will "play the savior" like he did 3 years ago.
Michigan continues to astound. Remember, the official estimates of how many Michiganders are eligible for ACA Medicaid expansion ranged from 477K - 500K.
Healthy Michigan Plan Enrollment Statistics
Beneficiaries with Healthy Michigan Plan Coverage: 596,246
(Includes beneficiaries enrolled in health plans and beneficiaries not required to enroll in a health plan.)
*Statistics as of March 23, 2015
*Updated every Monday at 3 p.m.
That's as much as 25% higher than the number supposedly eligible for the program.
This article is a bit outdated (it's from March 3rd); thanks to Andrew Sprung for finding it for me. Apparently over 200,000 people are now enrolled in Pennsylvania's "Healthy PA" program, which is the "alternative" Medicaid expansion plan set up by GOP Governor Tom Corbett prior to new Democratic Governor Tom Wolf taking charge. Wolf is in the process of flipping the program back to "standard" Medicaid expansion, but is running into a few snags:
Under former Gov. Tom Corbett's Healthy Pennsylvania program, the state built a second Medicaid managed-care system, separate from its HealthChoices Medicaid system that serves about 1.6 million residents. About 600,000 residents are eligible for the expanded coverage and about 200,000 have enrolled.
Among the more amusing tidbits surrounding Texas Senator and Joseph McCarthy Impersonator* Ted Cruz is the revelation that he foolishly never bothered registering TedCruz.com, with hilarious consequences.
Of course, he also failed to register other domains such as TedCruzForAmerica.com or (for those who don't know how to spell his name) TedCruze.com.
A new competitor entered the Idaho market this year, with a different business model. The Mountain Health CO-OP is Idaho's first Consumer Operated and Oriented Plan - a type of nonprofit organization authorized by the Affordable Care Act and supported with federal seed money.
The co-op's first year in Idaho yielded about 19,000 members by mid-March, with an additional 2,700 who hadn't yet paid their premiums. Most enrolled through the state exchange.
Mountain Health CO-OP expects to charge premiums high enough to allow it to avoid losing money, said spokeswoman Karen Early. "We are trying to have the lowest administrative cost we can," she said. The co-op expects its overhead and profits to be "well under" the 20 percent allowed by the law.
Thanks to HonestyinGov for giving me a heads up (via Twitter) to this Wall St. Journal article by Stephanie Armour the other day regarding a new survey (and several interviews with tax preparers) which claims that overall, those who will owe a tax penalty for not being insured last year and are still uninsured this year are not likely to go ahead and enroll during the 2015 tax filing season currently ongoing:
Major tax-preparation firms say many customers are paying the penalty and not getting health insurance. It is still early, since the special enrollment period launched Sunday, but research also suggests that many people who lack health insurance will pay the penalty and not get covered this year.
Only 12% of uninsured people would buy policies if informed of the penalty, according to a survey of 3,000 adults polled through Feb. 24 by McKinsey & Co.’s Center for U.S. Health System Reform.
Over on another comment thread, one ACA Signups regular is trying to parse out the question of "newly insured" vs. "previously insured" enrollees as they relate to both the ACA exchanges as well as Medicaid expansion. He admits to being surprised that I'm comfortable stating that "only" about 5-6 million of the current exchange enrollees are "newly insured" as opposed to "previously insured". I tried to explain both the numbers as well as the methodology headaches, but also decided this issue is worthy of a full entry, so here goes:
Meet Bob. Bob is married with 2 kids. In 2013, Bob was 64, his 2nd wife was 42, their son from Bob's first marriage was 24 and their daughter together was 15.
Bob had quite a year in 2014.
In December 2013, Bob and his wife, who had been uninsured for the past year, discovered that they qualified for Medicaid thanks to the ACA's expansion provision in their state. Their 15-year old daughter was already enrolled in the CHIP program, and their son was scrimping by on a junk "policy". Bob and his wife enrolled in Medicaid, effective January 1st.
