Welcome to the latest chapter in the long, epic CSR Lawsuit Saga which has been slogging along for six years now.
Here's a quick recap (again):
The ACA includes two types of financial subsidies for individual market enrollees through the ACA exchanges (HealthCare.Gov, CoveredCA.com, etc). One program is called Advance Premium Tax Credits (APTC), which reduces monthly premiums for low- and moderate-income. The other is called Cost Sharing Reductions (CSR), which reduces deductibles, co-pays and other out-of-pocket expenses for low-income enrollees.
In 2014, then-Speaker of the House John Boehner filed a lawsuit on behalf of Congressional Republicans against the Obama Administration. They had several beefs with the ACA (shocker!), including a claim that the CSR payments were unconstitutional because they weren't explicitly appropriated by Congress in the text of the Affordable Care Act (even though the program itself was described in detail, including the payment mechanism/etc.)
The data below comes from the GitHub data repositories of Johns Hopkins University, execpt for Rhode Island, Utah and Wyoming, which come from the GitHub data of the New York Times due to the JHU data being incomplete for these three states. Some data comes directly from state health department websites.
Here's the top 100 counties ranked by per capita COVID-19 cases as of Saturday, August 15th (click image for high-res version):
The good news is they include the number of people enrolled by each carrier in both markets, making it easy to calculate a weighted average, and th ey even include the SERFF tracking number for each.
The bad news is they don't include links to the actuarial memos, and even plugging the tracking numbers into the SERFF database only brings up the memos for three of the six carriers on the individual market...and of those, two of the three have been redacted (Oscar and Cigna), while the third (UnitedHealthcare) is brand-new to the North Carolina market anyway and therefore has no COVID-19 impact on their rate changes to speak of.
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Nolan Finley is the conservative editorial page editor of The Detroit News.
Two weeks ago, he tweeted this out in response to criticism of the COVID-19 policy recommendations by himself and Michigan Republican legislative leadership:
Florida 20 million population, 6100 deaths. Michigan 10 million population, 6400 deaths. https://t.co/O1tNoyWwB0
Let's take a look at the data, shall we? Here's a graph of official COVID-19 positive test cases and fatalities per capita for both Michigan and Florida. Cases are per 1,000 residents; deaths are per 10,000 in order to make the trendlines more visible:
As I noted last year, the Nevada Insurance Dept. website is both helpful and frustrating when it comes to tracking down the type of data that I need. On the one hand they make it very easy to view the individual & small group market rate filing summaries: Carrier names, markets, sumission dates, status, effective dates and most importantly, the proposed and approved average rate changes are all easily found.
On the other hand, they don't actually link to the filing memos or URRT forms, which means I can't find the actual effectuated enrollment numbers for each carrier, the impact of COVID-19 on each carrier's request or other noteworthy info about the filings. Oddly, they do include the SERFF tracking numbers...except that plugging those into the SERFF database still doesn't bring anything up, which kind of defeats the point.
Fortunately, the NV DOI does provide the weighted average of the entire market and COVID-19 impact elsewhere. I've also been able to piece together the total market enrollment (both on & off-exchange) using some other public data.
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I've acquired the preliminary 2021 rate filings for Georgia's individual and small group market carriers. There were two filings submitted for many of the carriers because of a (since delayed) ACA Section 1332 waivier submission; the carriers submitted one in case the waiver was approved and a second if it wasn't. Since the process has been delayed, however, the no-waiver filing is the one which is relevant.
As you can see in the tables at the bottom of this entry, the overall weighted rate change requested by individual market carriers in Georgia is a 1.3% reduction, which would have been more like a 2.3% drop if not for the COVID-19 factor, according to the carriers. The small group market carriers are requesting an 11.1% average increase, which is unusually high these days. I haven't reviewed all the memos for the sm. group market to see what they're pinning on COVID-19, however.
Here's what the indy market carriers have to say about the COVID-19 factor in their 2021 filings:
The data below comes from the GitHub data repositories of Johns Hopkins University, execpt for Rhode Island, Utah and Wyoming, which come from the GitHub data of the New York Times due to the JHU data being incomplete for these three states. Some data comes directly from state health department websites.
Here's the top 100 counties ranked by per capita COVID-19 cases as of Saturday, August 8th (click image for high-res version):
I don't often swear on this site (and almost never in the lede of the blog post, but this is the most sickening bit of gaslighting I've seen in awhile, which is saying something for the Trump Administration.
About an hour or so ago, Trump held a "press conference" in which he announced that he's supposedly signing an executive order to do exactly what the Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act, which he's currently suing to have struck down, ALREADY DOES.
So how is this being reported by certain "news media" outlets? Let's take a look:
