The FDA’s independent vaccine advisers voted unanimously Wednesday to recommend the agency authorize two Covid-19 vaccines for babies, toddlers and preschool-age children, putting the country’s youngest age group one step closer to immunizations nearly two-and-a-half years into the pandemic.
Florida is the only state in the union that did not preorder COVID-19 vaccines for children ages 4 and under, according to a report from the Miami Herald.
The nation’s third-largest state missed Tuesday’s deadline to preorder the doses from the federal government, which the Herald reports could delay delivery to Florida’s pediatricians, clinics, pharmacies and pediatric hospitals.
The Food and Drug Administration on Friday approved Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines for emergency use in children under the age of 5, a monumental step for parents who have spent the past two years buffeted by day care and school closures while taking strict precautions for the health of their kids.
Shots could be in toddlers’ arms before the end of June, pending approval from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
UPDATE 6/18/22:Advisers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Saturday unanimously recommended the nation’s first coronavirus vaccines for children under 5, one of the last steps before the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines can be given to as many as 19 million children across the United States.
Today, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) posted Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) regarding compensation paid by issuers to agents and brokers who assist consumers with enrollment during a Special Enrollment Period (SEP) or during Open Enrollment Periods (OEPs). The Biden-Harris Administration has made it a priority to provide those who are uninsured and underinsured with quality, affordable health care coverage and recognizes that agents and brokers play a vital role in helping consumers enroll in coverage that best fits their needs and budget.
The New York Dept. of Financial Services hasn't issued a formal press release yet, so it's conceivable that a few more filings will be added, but as far as I can tell, the spreadsheet below contains the preliminary unsubsidized 2023 premium change requests for every carrier offering ACA-compliant individual and small group market healthcare policies.
I've poked around the actual actuarial nattative summaries for several of the carriers with the higher market share (Excellus, Fidelis, etc) and while I see a couple of references to the set-to-expire expanded American Rescue Plan subsidies being set to expire at the end of 2022, this isn't listed as a significant factor in the rate filings (at least the ones I've looked at).
Assuming these rate hikes are approved of as is (which is no sure thing; New York tends to cut them down somewhat), unsubsidized individual market enrollees will be looking at average premium increases of 18.8%, while small group market policyholders will see a 16.3% average increase.
Throughout the 2 1/2 years of the pandemic, there have been numerous accusations of "cooking the books", "hiding deaths" and so forth thrown around at various administrations at the state and federal level. Some of these have proven to be false, others to be accurate, and many to be somewhere in between, depending on your perspective.
Perhaps no state-level administration has been subjected to as many accusations of "hiding data" as that of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. In my own case, the biggest data discrepancy I've written about regarding Florida was the massive vaccination rate outlier status of Miami-Dade County...a discrepancy which, at least in that case, turned out to be more about the legal residence of those vaccinated rather than whether the vaccinations actually took place or not.
Over the past few months, this site and numerous other healthcare policy outlets have been sounding the alarm over the ugly fallout if the expanded ACA subsidies put into place by the American Rescue Plan (ARP) last year are allowed to expire:
The Michigan Legislature is considering joining the 18 other states that have established state-run health insurance marketplaces through HB 6112. Having an exchange run by the state instead of the federal government, supporters of the bill say, will save Michiganders money by leaving the “rigid and inflexible” federal market for a Michigan-tailored market that can be more responsive and potentially lower premiums. The bill is still in the early days of the legislative process, awaiting a vote from the House Health Policy Committee.
I go by county residents who have received the 2nd COVID-19 shot only (or 1st in the case of the J&J vaccine).
I base my percentages on the total population via the 2020 U.S. Census including all ages (i.e., it includes kids under 12).
For most states + DC I use the daily data from the Centers for Disease Control, but there are some where the CDC is either missing county-level data entirely or where the CDC data is less than 90% complete at the county level. Therefore:
HOWEVER, there's one major outlier over the 65% threshold...Miami-Dade County.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, Miami-Dade has fully vaccinated 68% of their entire population (1.84 million out of 2.72 million residents). I use the slightly lower official 2020 U.S. Census popualtion count for Miami-Dade County (2,701,767), which makes the vaccination rate slightly higher still: 68.24%.
And yet, somehow the 10th-largest county in the United States, which has the 6th highest vaccination rate of any county over 1 million residents, also has the highest new case rate of any county over 1 million residents.
At the time, it was Miami-Dade's massive outlier status in terms of COVID cases since the beginning of July which had tipped me off; it looked like this:
HOWEVER, the MLR rule is still pretty important...and while the dollar amounts I'm about to discuss aren't much more than a rounding error in terms of federal budget numbers, it's possible that the could play a small role in helping get a much larger project moving forward.
Before I begin, here's a short refresher on how the MLR rule works:
