Yeah, yeah, I know; a test server for Healthcare.Gov was successfully hacked into recently; no sensitive data was stolen, but Security was Breached, etc etc etc.
No, I'm not shrugging the incident off. I'm the one who called Hawaii's state exchange website out for taking over a week to resolve their own Heartbleed SSL vulnerability last spring. Yes, security is very important, especially with personal financial, medical and citizenship data. Hopefully the HHS techies are eliminating vulnerabilities, beefing up security and so forth.
I'm swamped with my day job at the moment, so I don't have a whole lot to add to the discussion at the moment...
The Affordable Care Act's exchanges have not been a bust for every health insurer. Florida's Blue Cross and Blue Shield affiliate made a profit of almost a half-billion dollars on the ACA's new individual plans last year.
The substantial ACA exchange losses exhibited by large health insurers—such as Health Care Service Corp., Highmark, Humana and UnitedHealth Group—have emboldened the law's critics and worried investors about whether the new marketplaces will ever achieve sustainability.
Yet many other companies, including Medicaid insurers Centene Corp. andMolina Healthcare and now Florida Blue, have had no difficulties making money on the new ACA plans, which often have narrow networks of hospitals and doctors as well as high deductibles.
I already knew that Massachusetts was among the 30-odd states that UnitedHealthcare was dropping out of. However, it turns out that United is currently covering fewer than 500 of MA's exchange enrollees (considering that MA's entire individual market was only 72,000 people 2 years ago, and exchange enrollment alone is currently 224,000, I'd imagine that there aren't too many off-exchange United enrollees on top of those 500).
In addition, Guardian and MetLife are dropping off of MA's dental policy exchange, although according to their monthly report, neither one has any market share via the exchange this year anyway (Altus and Delta seem to make up 100% of the total). (correction: I was looking at the individual dental exchange; Guardian/MetLife are on the small group exchange this year)
The MA exchange reports an impressive 94% enrollment retention rate year over year:
The Massachusetts Health Connector has posted their latest monthly enrollment report, and the news is good. As I note every month:
Unlike most states, the Massachusetts Health Connector has not only seen no net attrition since the end of Open Enrollment, but has actually seen a net increase in enrollment...mainly due to their unique "ConnectorCare" policies, which are fully Qualified Health Plans (QHPs) but have additional financial assistance for those who qualify and which are available year-round instead of being limited to the open enrollment period.
House Republicans’ ObamaCare replacement plan will not include specific dollar figures on some of its core provisions, and will instead be more of a broad outline, according to lobbyists and aides.
The plan, set to be released next week, will include a tax credit to help people afford insurance and a cap on the current exclusion of employer-based health insurance plans from taxation.
However, it will not include specific dollar amounts on how large the tax credit would be, nor will it note which employer health insurance plans would be subject to taxation, lobbyists and aides said.
Speaker Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) office declined to comment on the plan ahead of its release next week, and noted it is still being finalized.
Republicans have said previously they will not be introducing their ObamaCare replacement plan in the form of a bill, but will instead release a white paper that is less detailed than legislation would be.
CMS Announces $22 Million in Affordable Care Act Funding for State Insurance Departments
Awards will help states enforce Affordable Care Act consumer protections
Health insurance companies that want to raise rates more than 10 percent next year will get an extra dose of scrutiny from Alabama regulators this year – for the first time since the marketplace launched in 2013.
Under Obamacare, states were supposed to implement systems for reviewing, and in some cases rejecting, rate increases that exceed 10 percent. Alabama was one of six states that didn't create an effective rate review program, despite receiving a $1 million grant to bolster oversight at the Department of Insurance, according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
After crunching the numbers for the requested rate changes (OK, rate hikes) across 31 states & DC, it looks like it's gonna be awhile longer for the remaining 19 states to post their rate filings publicly. For instance, while Michigan's SERFF database has had a whole mess of rate filing stuff posted for weeks now, none of them appear to include the two pieces of crucial data that I need for this project: The actual requested average percentage rate changes and the actual number of current lives covered by those policies...and likely won't for at least another week:
2017 Rate Filings - Individual Products - ALERT
The 2017 Individual Product filings are not yet complete. Partial filing information was submitted by issuers on May 9, 2016.
Thanks to Richard Mayhew of Balloon Juice for bringing this to my attention: This morning, Sabrina Corlette and JoAnn Volk of the Center on Health Insurance Reforms posted an amusing but also highly educational real-world example of the sort of non-ACA compliant healthcare plans that outfits like "Freedom Life" (aka "National Foundation" aka "Enterprise Life" aka "USHealth") specialize in...which also happen to be the exact types of plans that HHS is trying to keep a lid on with their recently-announced policy change.
Gun rights activists are constantly criticizing gun safety activists for not understanding the distinction between an "automatic" weapon, a "semi-automatic" weapon, a "machine gun", an "assault rifle" and so forth. I admit that I know very little about guns other than that their primary purpose...their only purpose, really...is to either kill or wound people or animals or, alternatively, to threaten to kill or wound.
Gun rights activists also constantly point out that you can kill/injure people with other items, such as knives, baseball bats, box cutters and so forth. This is true. However, unlike guns, those items actually have a useful primary purpose besides to kill or injure. If you remove baseball bats from someone's hands, they can't play baseball. If you remove knives from their hands, they can't slice bread.
If you remove a gun from their hands, the only thing they can't do is...shoot stuff.
