It may seem a bit pointless to keep posting 2015 premium rate changes now that we're only 6 weeks away from the Open Enrollment period anyway (everyone will find out soon enough at this point), but the BS is still flying fast & furious, and the topic seems especially relevant in Minnesota's case since the largest insurer on the 2014 exchange, PreferredOne, has pulled out for Year Two:
Minnesota officials say the average rate for policies sold on the state health insurance exchange next year will go up 4.5 percent.
But, they say Minnesotans will still have access to the lowest average rates in the nation.
The five companies participating in the exchange range from dropping their averages by 10 percent to hiking them more than 17 percent.
They declined to say which companies are raising rates and which are lowering them.
BluePlus joins Blue Cross Blue Shield, HealthPartners, Medica and UCare this year.
Unfortunately, not only is there no way of doing a weighted average here since the current enrollees for the various plans aren't listed, I can't even post which companies are increasing or decreasing their rates. Ah, well.
A few weeks ago, I posted "Get ready for the "OMG!! GAZILLIONS OF POLICIES CANCELLED!!" Freakout" in which I pointed out that while yes, some policies which aren't in compliance with ACA requirements will indeed be discontinued this year, the odds are that the actual number will end up being far fewer than the GOP attacks will claim.
Well, right on schedule, here comes the freakout, and as I expected, the actual number of policies cancelled looks like it'll be missing a few zeroes from the attack headlines:
Thousands of Americans will see their health plans cancelled before the November elections in a development that could boost critics of ObamaCare.
The Morning Consult, a Washington-based policy publication, reported that nearly 50,000 people will lose their current health coverage in the coming weeks.
This story is beyond disgusting. The Michigan Republican Party has mailed out a hit piece on John Fisher the Democratic candidate for Michigan’s 61st House district. The mailer asks the recipient to call a phone number to complain about Fisher’s support of the Affordable Care Act. The number they give rings at the bedside of Fisher’s mother, 91-year-old Isabel Marie Kramb, who is in hospice care with congestive heart failure.
It finally happened. A new poll shows a majority that want Obamacare repealed. Sort of. And the Weekly Standard rejoices, with the headline "60 percent of voters want Obamacare to be repealed." Maybe they shouldn't rush to uncork that champagne. Because the pollsters here are McLaughlin & Associates. These guys. There's a track record here, reflected most recently in the internal polling they did for for Eric Cantor, showing him leading by 34 points just before he lost by 11. That's a 45 point error.
But so what if they got Cantor, Gabriel Gomez, Bob Dold, Mitt Romney, Richard Mourdock, George Allen and countless others wrong. They've got to get it right sometime, surely. Well, yeah, when you ask a question like this to get 60 percent approval:
Yes, I know I just updated Minnesota 2 days ago, and no, the latest numbers aren't terribly significant increases, but given that MN is the only state which has been consistently updating their data almost daily, with a nice simple breakout between QHPs, Medicaid and MinnesotaCare (a sort of quasi-Medicaid/QHP hybrid allowed for by the ACA), I figured I owed it to them to provide an update which matches their numbers up precisely with Day 365...exactly 1 year to the day since the exchanges launched last October:
enrollment update
latest enrollment numbers
September 30, 2014
Health Coverage Type Cumulative Enrollments
Medical Assistance 214,071
MinnesotaCare 75,013
Qualified Health Plan (QHP) 55,148
TOTAL 344,232
The Affordable Care Act includes several reinsurance programs that were supposed to help insurers mitigate the risk of mispricing their policies as they ventured into the strange new world of selling insurance on the government exchanges. The administration is leaning hard on these programs to keep insurers in the game, allowing payments out to be higher than payments in, and otherwise substantially reducing the potential losses that insurers can experience when selling exchange policies.
...The GAO responded that the payments are indeed legal, but for them to be legal again in 2015, the appropriations language for 2015 would have to be similar to this year’s language.
But even as Obamacare found its sea legs nationally and boasted solid first enrollment numbers in recent weeks [reminder: article is from April], it still came as a surprise to local political watchers when a Kentucky Democratic congressional candidate picked up the ACA baton and used it to bash the GOP incumbent that she is challenging. Elisabeth Jensen, the presumptive favorite to take on Lexington Congressman Andy Barr this November, emerged last week as the first federal candidate in the region—and one of only a few in the entire country—to broadcast a campaign ad championing health care reform, and attacking her opponent for voting more than a dozen times to repeal it.
The headline is a bit tongue-in-cheek, of course; in spite of Republican "Euro-Socialist" stereotypes, not every country in Europe is "socialist" (and even then, "socialism" has many different flavors/ranges just as "capitalism" does). Still, the irony of this development is rather amusing on the 1-year anniversary of the ACA "Obamacare" health insurance exchanges:
Swiss voters resoundingly rejected a proposal to move the country to asingle-payer system on Sunday. Instead, the country will keep its private health insurance system, which looks a whole lot like Obamacare.
Two-thirds of Swiss voters opposed creating a state-run health plan in the national referendum.
...For a country with a relatively small population (8 million), Switzerland comes up a shocking amount in debates over American health care. That's probably because the Swiss health care system looks pretty similar to the one Obamacare sets up.
OK, this isn't particularly dramatic given that I've already projected the cumulative total QHP figure to hit around 9.9 million by November 15th, but it's still nice to mark the occasion of another milestone being hit. By my best estimates, assuming 9,000 people enrolling in private Qualified Health Plans via the various ACA exchanges every day during the off-season, the grand total should have hit the 9.5 million mark right around midnight last night.
Of those 9.5 million, I estimate that around 8.2 million of them have paid their first month premium already, with another 300K or so who will do so sometime this month. I further estimate that the current number enrolled (after subtracting those who have dropped their coverage after the first month) should be around 7.4 million at the moment:
