A judge has blasted a California software giant's claim that a cabal of campaign advisers are to blame for the decision to tank the state's $300 million Cover Oregon website project.
Oracle in February sued five campaign advisers and consultants to former Gov. John Kitzhaber, who resigned in February. Oracle argued the exchange was ready to roll out in February 2014, but said advisers led by Patricia McCaig pulled the plug on the project for political reasons.
On Monday, Multnomah Circuit Court Judge Henry Kantor issued a written opinion ripping Oracle's legal arguments using language that went far beyond his earlier e-mailed notice of the decision. He called Oracle's arguments "totally unsupported by the evidence provided."
Assuming my ballpark estimate of appx. 7,500Off-Season QHP Selections Per Day is accurate, the grand total nationally should be breaking the 13 million milestone right about...now-ish (or at least sometime this week).
I should note that thanks to this morning's New York update, the confirmed total has now officially broken the 12.1 million mark. The other 900,000 or so haven't been reported yet, and are mostly via Healthcare.Gov, of course.
Our growth continues to be balanced so far in 2015 as we added 571,000 Medicaid members, 331,000 national members, 51,000 individual members and 16,000 local group members. As a reminder, we closed on the Simply Healthcare acquisition in February of this year, which contributed 209,000 members. These results have been supported by strong operating cash flow of $2.8 billion year-to-date, which represents 1.6 times net income.
Humana Group is one of the largest health insurance companies in the country. As such, their enrollment data being made available is extremely helpful in seeing where things stand and how they've changed nationally.
Today, Bob Herman of Modern Healthcare provided me with a link to Humana's latest SEC filing. In addition to a whole mess of financial info which is of little interest to me, there's also all sorts of year-over-year data about their enrollment numbers...including a very handy section about their individual market, broken out by ACA exchange-based, Off Exchange and even their non-ACA compliant enrollments (ie, "grandfathered" and/or "transitional" enrollees).
Unfortunately, the data gets cut off as of 2/28/15, so this doesn't give any insight into the attrition rate since then (or a precise count of how many additional people enrolled during the #ACATaxTime special enrollment period which followed). However, it does give a lot of detailed analysis of the open enrollment period numbers, and does tack on an extra week's worth of private enrollments & 2 week's worth of CH+/Medicaid numbers (the official HHS report only ran through 2/21 for New York and the last press release with CH+/Medicaid numbers was as of 2/15).
As a result, the official numbers are slightly higher than what I had until now across the board:
A team of actuaries at the Minnesota Department of Commerce are currently scrutinizing the proposed rates that have been filed for 2016, and final rates will be announced on October 1. But for now, four MNsure’s individual market carriers have proposed the following rate changes for coverage effective January 1, 2016 (market share is as of the end of the 2015 open enrollment period):
UPDATE 8/27/15: I've been writing up a whole mess of *approved* state rate updates today; look for this entry to be updated on Friday.
Recently, Richard Simpkins (aka icowrich) gave me the idea to take the known state-wide 2016 rate increase requests and go a step further, by plugging the weighted average rate increases for each state into a spreadsheet and then running a weighted average based on each state's proportion of the total U.S. population, like so (scroll to bottom of this entry for links to analysis for each state):
Remember that University of Michigan study I posted about last week which claimed that in spite of all the predictions by ACA opponents that expanding Medicaid would make it impossible for enrollees to actually make a doctor's appointment, the opposite ended up being the case?
A new University of Michigan study shows that the availability of primary care appointments actually improved for people with Medicaid in the first months after the state launched the Healthy Michigan Plan, the state’s Medicaid expansion under the ACA. What’s more, it remained mostly unchanged for those with private insurance.
Well, apparently the Michigan results are not an outlier:
I very rarely write much about Medicare here, partly because I just don't have time to cover every aspect of the healthcare system, partly because Medicare is only impacted by the ACA indirectly for the most part. However, there's been two recent developments which are worth noting:
The slowing growth of healthcare costs has extended Medicare's projected lifespan 13 years beyond projections made in 2009, the last report issued before the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
The Medicare Hospital Insurance Trust Fund will have "sufficient funds to cover its obligations until 2030," the Medicare Board of Trustees said Wednesday in its annual financial review of the $613 billion program.
