The Kaiser Family Foundation has posted a very handy table listing how many people in each state are receiving federal tax credits for ACA exchange-purchased healthcare policies this year, how much those policies would cost (on average) at full price, and what the average tax credit in each state is.
I'm using their data to take this info one step further: If the Supreme Court does tear away the tax credits in states operating on the federal marketplace, just how many people would be screwed by the ruling as a result, both on and off the exchanges? Remember, studies by both the Urban Institute and the RAND Corporation agree that average individual market premiums would rise by at least 35% in those states (and potentially as high as 45% in all states) as a result of such a ruling. The American Academy of Actuaries is taking these projections very, very seriously.
PEMBROKE, Maine — Jeremy Brown has made a living hunting scallops in unforgiving waters off the state’s far eastern tip, where doctor visits are often construed as signs of weakness.
But sometimes his back hurts. His son got sick. Like many in Maine’s coastal fishing communities, he begrudgingly accepted insurance offered to his family through the Affordable Care Act and has come to rely on a federal discount to keep it.
Now, that support may disappear for tens of thousands of families in Maine and New Hampshire.
...The Affordable Care Act, President Obama’s signature legislative achievement, was enacted in 2010 and GOP lawmakers have worked to kill it since. They object to the cost and consider it governmental overreach. But if the law gets uprooted without a viable replacement, Republicans could face a backlash.
Yeah, I know, not exactly an earth-shattering development, but it's a fairly slow news day ACA-wise, and everyone's spazzing out about Hillary Clinton's a) email brouhaha and/or b) her (supposedly) imminent official announcement about whether or not she's gonna run for President next year, so I figured this was worth a post:
Repeal of the ACA would let insurers write their own rules again, and wipe out coverage for 16 million Americans.
But luckily the Constitution supplies a contingency plan, even if the administration doesn’t know it yet: If the administration loses in King, it can announce that it is complying with the Supreme Court’s judgment — but only with respect to the four plaintiffs who brought the suit.
This announcement would not defy a Supreme Court order, since the court has the formal power to order a remedy only for the four people actually before it. The administration would simply be refusing to extend the Supreme Court’s reasoning to the millions of people who, like the plaintiffs, may be eligible for tax credits but, unlike the plaintiffs, did not sue.
Beneficiaries with Healthy Michigan Plan Coverage: 588,641
(Includes beneficiaries enrolled in health plans and beneficiaries not required to enroll in a health plan.)
*Statistics as of March 16, 2015
*Updated every Monday at 3 p.m.
So, for a year and a half now, I've been plugging raw data into spreadsheets and meticulously tallying the health insurance comings & goings of pretty much every person outside of Medicare, traditional Medicaid, ESI and the Indian Health Service.
I've learned more about the different types of health insurance polices than I ever wanted to. Small group. Large group. Off-exchange. "Grandfathered" plans. "Transitional" plans. The Child Health Plus (CHP) program in New York (not to be confused with the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP). The Basic Health Plan in Minnesota (MinnesotaCare). HMOs. PPOs. EMOs. "Sub26ers". Different Metal Levels.
Pharmspective is a company that specializes in healthcare industry data visualization/management apps. Most recently, they've announced a new app called "ACO Tracker" which basically does just that: Unscrambles information about Accountable Care Organizations, which are a Big Deal® these days.
Full disclosure: While they're not paying me to promote this particular app for them, they did pay me to help out with some data issues last fall, so take that for what you will (as an aside, in the process of helping them answer some questions which aren't directly related to this site last year, I also stumbled upon some info which is directly related, so that worked out nicely).
Anyway, I don't know much about ACOs myself, but as a data nerd it seems like a pretty cool app for those interested in this area, so what the heck: Check it out.
Wyoming Gov. Matt Mead (R) is no fan of the Affordable Care Act. He supported the first Supreme Court case seeking to repeal the law, and he claimed that the law is “unconstitutional.” And yet, at a news conference last week, Mead echoed many of the Justice Department’s warnings regarding what will happen if the justices side with a new case seeking to gut the law. Indeed, according to the Wyoming Tribune Eagle, Mead “hopes the court will reject the case and uphold the law.”
...In his press conference, Mead worried about the chaos that would result from a decision that allowed all of this to happen. “If on June 30, if that’s when the case comes down, and they say no more subsidies for federal exchanges … it is going to cause a lot of turmoil,” he warned, adding that his home state of Wyoming “will be scrambling” if the King plaintiffs win their case.
OK, I lied; I do have one comment which Gov. Mead might want to pass along to his Republican colleagues in Congress:
OK, this one came out of nowhere, but it's helpful: The Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE, the source of the official monthly ACA exchange enrollment reports) and the Director of the Office of Health Reform at the Health & Human Services Dept. just released a new report which states that:
Since several of the Affordable Care Act’s March coverage provisions took effect, about 16.4 million uninsured people have gained health insurance coverage. That includes:
