Massachusetts Health Connector and member carriers agree to carry over out-of-pocket costs for mid-year moves to access new lower premiums on-exchange

• Agreement allows carrier members to access to lower Health Connector premiums as a result of the American Rescue Plan without resetting deductibles in 2021

May 20, 2021 – All nine health insurance carriers who participate in the Massachusetts Health Connector have agreed to let their off-exchange members move from an off-exchange plan to an exchange-based plan mid-year without losing spent out-of-pocket costs in 2021. This flexibility can help Massachusetts residents access new lower-cost plans through the Health Connector.

This just in from Covered California...

Covered California’s Enrollment Surges as People Sign Up to Benefit From the New Financial Help and Lower Premiums Now Available Through the American Rescue Plan

• More than 76,000 people signed up for health insurance during Covered California’s special-enrollment period between April 12 and May 15.
• The surge is more than 2.5 times higher than a traditional special-enrollment period, reflecting an increase of more than 46,000 people, compared to the same time period in 2019.
• Covered California launched a special-enrollment period to allow the uninsured and those enrolled directly through a health insurance carrier to enroll and benefit from lower premiums due to the American Rescue Plan.
• More than half of the Covered California households which are benefiting from the new and expanded financial help provided by the American Rescue Plan are getting high-quality coverage for $1 per month.
• In order to start saving, Californians need to enroll by May 31 so they can begin benefiting from the new law on June 1.

Now that I've developed a standardized format/layout & methodology for tracking both state- and county-level COVID vaccination levels by partisan lean (which can also be easily applied to other variables like education level, median income, population density, ethnicity, etc), I've started moving beyond my home state of Michigan. Here's California, and it's pretty eye-opening.

• 2020 Presidential Election results via CA Secretary of State's office (thru Wikipedia)
• Total vaccination doses administered via California Public Health Dept.

So over the weekend, I posted a simple scatter plot graph which displayed the current COVID-19 vaccination rates across all 50 states +DC according to what percent of the 2020 Presidential vote was won by Donald Trump.

The original version (with the incorrect New Hampshire data) went somewhat viral on Twitter; it's racked up over 12,000 Likes and thousands of retweets as of this writing.

Here's what it looked like after I made a couple of corrections (particularly New Hampshire, which had some data reporting glitches which have since been worked out):

Via Nevada Health Link:

Nevada Health Link Saves Thousands of Nevadans Money Through 2021 Special Enrollment Periods

CARSON CITY, Nev. (May 17, 2021) –Nevada Health Link, the online health insurance marketplace operated by the state agency, the Silver State Health Insurance Exchange (Exchange), has enrolled more than 7,600 Nevadans since the implementation of two Special Enrollment Periods in 2021, including more than 4,500 enrollees since April 20, attributed to the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA or American Rescue Plan).

The American Rescue Plan, which was signed into law on March 11, provides Nevadans with a Special Enrollment Period where insured and uninsured Nevadans can take advantage of new, drastically reduced insurance premiums from now until August 15.

A few weeks ago I noted that my year-long tracking of COVID-19 cases and deaths along partisan lines has proven to be very much justified, as recent headlines in major news outs have proven:

Nearly half of Republicans say they don’t want a Covid vaccine, a big public health challenge.

But more than two in five Republicans said they would avoid getting vaccinated if possible, suggesting that President Biden has not succeeded in his effort to depoliticize the vaccines — and leaving open the question of whether the country will be able to achieve herd immunity without a stronger push from Republican leaders to bring their voters on board.

‘I’m still a zero’: Vaccine-resistant Republicans warn that their skepticism is worsening

Huh. Vermont's ACA exchange website, Vermont Health Connect, has looked pretty much the same for at least the past 5-6 years, but a month or so ago they quietly overhauled the layout & design interface of the site. I have no idea if they actually updated the back-end, however.

In any event, the VT Health Connect's COVID-19 Special Enrollment Period was originally supposed to end last Friday (May 14th), but they appear to have done something else without much fanfare as well:

 I've done my best to label every state/territory, which obviously isn't easy to do for most of them given how tangled it gets in the middle.

NOTE: I've recently updated the spreadsheet to account for the official 2020 Census Bureau populations of every state. In most cases this has nudged their case & mortality rates down slightly.

Nearly 1 out of every 7 residents of North Dakota, South Dakota and Rhode Island have tested positive for COVID-19 to date.

More than 1 out of every 8 residents of Iowa.

More than 1 out of every 9 residents of Tennessee, Utah, Arizona, South Carolina, Oklahoma, Nebraska and Arkansas.

More than 1 out of 10 in New Jersey, Indiana, Delaware, Alabama, Illinois, Florida, Mississippi, Kansas, New York, Minnesota, Georgia, Idaho, Nevada, Wisconsin, Wyoming, Montana, Texas and Kentucky.

More than 1 out of 20 in every state & territory EXCEPT Guam, Maine, Oregon, Vermont, U.S. Virgin Islands, Hawaii, N. Mariana Islands & American Samoa.

The vaccination levels for each state below are based on taking the total number of COVID-19 doses administered to date according to the Centers for Disease Control), then and dividing that into double the state population (since each person needs two doses to be fully vaccinated) as of April 2020 according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

I then adjust each state by counting the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine twice (since it's effectively similar to getting 2 Pfizer or Moderna doses).

UPDATE 5/21/21: The first few times I did this, I estimated J&J at 3.5% for every state; since then I've found that the CDC does provide the exact number of each type of vaccine for every state...it ranges from as low as 1.9% in Hawaii to as high as 6.5% in Maine, which is kind of interesting. The later graphs at the bottom have been adjusted to reflect this.

The data below comes from the GitHub data repositories of Johns Hopkins University, except for Utah, which comes from the GitHub data of the New York Times due to JHU not breaking the state out by county but by "region" for some reason.

Important:

• Every county except those in Alaska lists the 2020 Biden/Trump partisan lean; Alaska still uses the 2016 Clinton/Trump results (the 2020 Alaska results are only available by state legislative district, not by county/borough for some reason...if anyone has that info let me know)

• I define a "Swing District" as one where the difference between Biden & Trump was less than 6.0%. FWIW, there's just 187 swing districts (out of over 3,100 total), with around 33.7 million Americans out of 332 million total, or roughly 10.2% of the U.S. population.

• For the U.S. territories, Puerto Rico only includes the case breakout, not deaths, which are unavailable by county equivalent for some reason.

With those caveats in mind, here's the top 100 counties ranked by per capita COVID-19 cases as of Friday, May 14h, 2021 (click image for high-res version).

• Blue = Joe Biden won by more than 6 points
• Orange = Donald Trump won by more than 6 points
• Yellow = Swing District (Biden or Trump won by less than 6 points)