For weeks now I've been pointing out that just when the most recent round of unusually high (unsubsidized) rate hikes seemed to have reassured insurance carriers on the ACA exchanges that they were over the hump...just when things seemed to be settling down for next year's enrollment period...Donald Trump won the the election, triggering the Republican-held Congress to start tearing things apart left and right, throwing everything into chaos again.
On Tuesday I noted that all of this confusion and uncertainty caused by Trump/the GOP Congress has started giving heartburn to insurance executives. Again: In October, just before the election, Molina Healthcare was happy as a clam with their exchange business and projected "another solid year" ahead. And now???
The Trump administration apparently was unable to scrap all outreach efforts to enroll individuals in Obamacare, following widespread concern that its move Thursday to pull ads promoting enrollment could destabilize the insurance marketplace.
It may seem a little silly to keep posting these tiny individual-state updates with everything going on at the moment, but every enrollee counts. Access Health CT held their monthly board meeting yesterday and posted some noteworthy data/policy points.
The irony is that this is exactly how the ACA should be being handled by Congress and the President: By using actual hard data and logic, problem-solving, fixing what's broken and improving upon what isn't.
...none of which seems to mean a damned thing to Trump or the Trumpublican Party.
107,736 have enrolled in a QHP for 2017. That includes 12k new customers. #AHCTBoDMeeting
With the GOP Congress still obsessed with repealing the ACA and Donald Trump doing everything in his power to sabotage the law whether it gets repealed or not, the final 5 days of the 2017 Open Enrollment Period, which would normally see a spike in enrollments regardless, is going into a bit of a panic mode. Trump and his Republican cohorts are doing whatever he can to discourage people from enrolling before the deadline, while the insurance carriers, healthcare advocates and everyone else is doing whatever they can to encourage it.
New York State of Health, the NY ACA exchange, just announced that with the 1/31 final deadline rapidly approaching next Tuesday, they're extending their customer service hours on Saturday and Sunday.
The Trump administration has pulled the plug on all Obamacare outreach and advertising in the crucial final days of the 2017 enrollment season, according to sources at Health and Human Services and on Capitol Hill.
Even ads that had already been placed and paid for have been pulled, the sources told POLITICO.
...Individuals may still sign up for Obamacare plans until the Jan. 31 deadline — but the Trump administration isn't advertising that fact any longer.
It is also halting all media outreach designed to spur signups in the days leading up to the deadline. Emails are no longer being sent out to individuals who visited HealthCare.gov, the enrollment website, to encourage them to finish signing up. Those emails had proven highly successful in getting stragglers to complete enrollment before the deadline.
A few weeks ago, frustrated with the disturbingly large number of Trump supporters (and, let's face it, plenty of non-voters and even a few Hillary supporters) who still seemed to be unaware that "Obamacare" and "The Affordable Care Act" are the exact same thing, I whipped up a snarky and admittedly sarcastic infographic trying to clue them in.
A few days later, after calming down a bit, I reworked the infographic into a nonjudgmental, more informative version:
SEN. TOOMEY: “Now, one way to force it is to force insurance companies to provide health insurance coverage for someone as soon as they show up, regardless of what condition they have, which is kind of like asking the property casualty company to rebuild the house after it’s already burnt down.”
Now, aside from the obvious callousness of this statement, there's a couple of important problems with his comparison:
Politically, the big unknown is whether or not Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell will get away with trying to pin the blame for this on the Democrats/the law itself. That's why they've been pushing the "Obamacare is already in a death spiral!" claim hard for the past few weeks, even though it quite simply isn't.
...So, if this does end up in a worst-case scenario, Trump's "stop enforcing the mandate altogether!" order here could end up causing that death spiral even if the GOP doesn't technically end up repealing anything legislatively. The carriers would start announcing that they're bailing next year as soon as this spring (remember, the first paperwork for 2018 exchange participation has to be filed in April or May), and McConnell/Ryan would simply say, "See?? We told you it was collapsing all by itself! We didn't touch nuthin'!!"
As has been obvious for some time now, the early projections by the Congressional Budget Office back in the pre-exchange days of 2010 - 2013, which foresaw ACA exchange enrollment heading into the 20-million-plus range by this point, obviously not only never came to pass, but are unlikely to do so anytime in the near future under the current legal/healthcare policy structure. There are several reasons for this ranging from legitimate problems with the structure of the ACA itself to Republican obstruction, but the two most obvious errors the CBO made in their projections were:
