Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, MD, declared a public health emergency in Texas on Saturday as Hurricane Harvey was pounding the state's coast.
Harvey made landfall late Friday night with winds topping 130 mph. Forecasts called for the storm to hover over the state for 5 days or more, possibly drenching some areas with as much as 50 inches of rain. Hundreds of thousands were without power and the National Weather Service said parts of Texas could be "uninhabitable for weeks or months."
"Many Medicare beneficiaries have been evacuated to neighboring communities where receiving hospitals and nursing homes may have no health care records, information on current health status or even verification of the person's status as a Medicare beneficiary. Due to the emergency declaration and other actions taken by HHS, CMS is able to waive certain documentation requirements to help ensure facilities can deliver care," an HHS statement read.
In light of this, I thought it might be a good idea to remember his last such plan, introduced back on January 18, 2016 in the midst of his heated primary battle with Hillary Clinton.
If you visit BernieSanders.com and click on the "Issues" tab today, you can still find his official 2016 campaign "Medicare for All" plan, without a single word changed.
It's important to note that while Bernie's plan as presented on his website was not actual legislative text, it was, in his own words, the "FULL plan"...that is, this wasn't supposed to be a "summarized" version or an "overview", but literally "the FULL PLAN", as the link leading to it clearly states twice:
Amidst all the discussion and debate about how to fix/improve/strengthen/expand the Affordable Care Act, one thing I've written about as much as anyone else (and far more than many others) is people enrolled in the unsubsidized individual market. To recap: Around 18 million people are enrolled in individual market policies, of which around half (9 million) receive tax credits to help cover a chunk of the premiums. Of those, around 7 million also receive CSR assistance to help cover deductibles and co-pays. The amount/portion of their expenses which are covered varies from high to low based on a sliding income scale, and it's frankly too skimpy at the upper end of that range, but at least these folks receive some assistance.
File this one under "Be Careful What You Wish For".
Just a couple of days ago I reported that the New York Dept. of Financial Services had issued their approved 2018 rate changes for the 15 insurance carriers participating in the state's individual and small group markets...and, in some welcome news, they whittled down the rate increases by a bit, from 17.7% on average to 14.5% on average in the individual market, and from 11.7% to 9.3% in the small group market.
New York State’s biggest hospital system plans to stop selling Obamacare plans, blaming a costly plank of the law and uncertain prospects for a fix amid a wider Washington brawl over health care.
Hey Michigan Residents! Do you live in the Clinton Township area?
If so, come on out on Sunday, August 27th, and join Congressman Sander Levin, State Representative Henry Yanez and myself as we explain what the latest craziness is regarding the ACA, the GOP attempts to repeal and/or sabotage it and healthcare policy in general from 2:00pm - 4:00pm at the Clinton Macomb Public Library:
As I noted last month with my "Silver Switcharoo" explainer, for carriers which remain in the ACA exchanges next year, there's three potential scenarios which could happen (well, four, actually, if you include "Congress manages to sneak a full CSR appropriation bill into law just under the wire", although that seems pretty unlikely at this point given the time crunch and the fact that it'd need a 2/3 majority in both the House and Senate to avoid being vetoed by Trump anyway):
Quick recap: As of 2013, the pre-ACA individual market consisted of around 10.7 million people. The vast majority of the policies these folks were enrolled in were not ACA-compliant for one reason or another, including not covering one or more of the 10 Essential Health Benefits (EHBs) required by the ACA, having annual/lifetime caps on benefits or any number of other reasons.
Under ACA regulations, non-compliant policies which people were enrolled in prior to March 2010 (when President Obama signed the ACA into law) were grandfathered in...that is, insurance carriers could continue to offer them to existing enrollees for as long as they wanted to, and existing enrollees could stay on them for as long as they wished, but they couldn't be offered to anyone else, and once a current enrollee dropped out of a grandfathered plan they aren't allowed to rejoin it later on. The number of "grandfathered" enrollees has gradually declined since 2013, of course, as people either move to other coverage, die off (hey, it happens) or the carriers decide to discontinue the policies altogether.
Back in early June, the New York Dept. of Financial Services posted the requested 2018 rate hikes for the individual and small group markets. In most states, the CSR reimbursement issue is a much bigger factor than whether or not the Trump Administration enforces the individual mandate, but in New York it's the exact opposite: According to the NY DFS, loss of CSR payments would only tack on 1.3 points to the total, while "a full repeal of the federal individual mandate would increase rates by an additional 32.6%".
The reason for the fairly nominal CSR factor is that the vast majority of NY's CSR-eligible population (those earning 138-200% FPL) is instead enrolled in the state's Basic Health Program. As a result, only 26% of New York's exchange enrollees receive CSR assistance, and the 200-250% FPL recipients only receive a fairly skimpy amount of CSR help anyway. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the 32-point mandate factor is far higher than most carriers are indicating (more like 4-5 points), but there's a big difference between the administration "not enforcing" the penalty and outright repealing it, which NY DFS is talking about.
In any event, this means that NY's requested average increases boiled down to: 15.0% if CSRs are paid/mandate enforced, 16.6% if CSRs aren't paid/mandate is enforced, or a whopping 50.5% if CSRs aren't paid and the mandate was repealed.
OK, perhaps this is just me being paranoid, but then again, given the #TrumpRussia/Hacking brouhaha, perhaps not.
Like most website owners, now and then I like to check my website analytics to see how the site is doing traffic-wise. Every now and then I'll poke through the various demographics of site visitors. Once in a blue moon I'll even check which country people are visiting from. Given the nature of this site, obviously the vast majority of the traffic comes from the United States; after that, most visitors typically come from Canada, the United Kingdom or France, none of which is particularly surprising.
However, I noticed something interesting today, and decided to go back to prior years to check on something...and sure enough, guess what?
