Last week I posted an exclusive story over at healthinsurance.org regarding attempts by the Minnesota Republican-held legislature to sneak in a nasty amendment which, had it passed and been signed into law, would have given insurance carriers the right to offer policies which cover, basically nothing whatsoever.
The story ended on a happy note a few days later, as the massive negative backlash caused the state GOP to yank the amendment from the bill in question just before it went to the final vote. Awesome!!
However, I never really explained exactly what bill the pulled amendment was attached to in the first place. I should have written up a full entry on this, but have been swamped all week due to the political insanity and rapidly-changing situation on everything, so here's the basics:
New Mexico is one of five states (also including Nevada, Oregon, Hawaii and Kentucky) which technically operate their own state-based ACA exchange, but utilize HealthCare.Gov as their website enrollment platform. As such, their enrollment numbers are usually only released along with the other three dozen states on the federal exchange.
However, once in awhile they post the enrollment numbers themselves; today is such a day:
@charles_gabaNMHIX: 52,006 total signups - almost as much as last year. Still anticipating a surge as NMHIX continues ads and outreach.
The breakout here is 36,579 renewals + 15,427 new enrollees, or a 70/30 split.
Last year, New Mexico's total came in at 54,865 QHP selections, so they've hit 95% of that so far.
My original target for New Mexico for this year was 60,000, though I've knocked this down to 57,000 more recently. They're at around 91% of that so far, with less than a week to go. They'll have to add another 5,000 people in the final surge, which seems unlikely, but who knows?
For weeks now I've been pointing out that just when the most recent round of unusually high (unsubsidized) rate hikes seemed to have reassured insurance carriers on the ACA exchanges that they were over the hump...just when things seemed to be settling down for next year's enrollment period...Donald Trump won the the election, triggering the Republican-held Congress to start tearing things apart left and right, throwing everything into chaos again.
On Tuesday I noted that all of this confusion and uncertainty caused by Trump/the GOP Congress has started giving heartburn to insurance executives. Again: In October, just before the election, Molina Healthcare was happy as a clam with their exchange business and projected "another solid year" ahead. And now???
The Trump administration apparently was unable to scrap all outreach efforts to enroll individuals in Obamacare, following widespread concern that its move Thursday to pull ads promoting enrollment could destabilize the insurance marketplace.
It may seem a little silly to keep posting these tiny individual-state updates with everything going on at the moment, but every enrollee counts. Access Health CT held their monthly board meeting yesterday and posted some noteworthy data/policy points.
The irony is that this is exactly how the ACA should be being handled by Congress and the President: By using actual hard data and logic, problem-solving, fixing what's broken and improving upon what isn't.
...none of which seems to mean a damned thing to Trump or the Trumpublican Party.
107,736 have enrolled in a QHP for 2017. That includes 12k new customers. #AHCTBoDMeeting
With the GOP Congress still obsessed with repealing the ACA and Donald Trump doing everything in his power to sabotage the law whether it gets repealed or not, the final 5 days of the 2017 Open Enrollment Period, which would normally see a spike in enrollments regardless, is going into a bit of a panic mode. Trump and his Republican cohorts are doing whatever he can to discourage people from enrolling before the deadline, while the insurance carriers, healthcare advocates and everyone else is doing whatever they can to encourage it.
New York State of Health, the NY ACA exchange, just announced that with the 1/31 final deadline rapidly approaching next Tuesday, they're extending their customer service hours on Saturday and Sunday.
The Trump administration has pulled the plug on all Obamacare outreach and advertising in the crucial final days of the 2017 enrollment season, according to sources at Health and Human Services and on Capitol Hill.
Even ads that had already been placed and paid for have been pulled, the sources told POLITICO.
...Individuals may still sign up for Obamacare plans until the Jan. 31 deadline — but the Trump administration isn't advertising that fact any longer.
It is also halting all media outreach designed to spur signups in the days leading up to the deadline. Emails are no longer being sent out to individuals who visited HealthCare.gov, the enrollment website, to encourage them to finish signing up. Those emails had proven highly successful in getting stragglers to complete enrollment before the deadline.
A few weeks ago, frustrated with the disturbingly large number of Trump supporters (and, let's face it, plenty of non-voters and even a few Hillary supporters) who still seemed to be unaware that "Obamacare" and "The Affordable Care Act" are the exact same thing, I whipped up a snarky and admittedly sarcastic infographic trying to clue them in.
A few days later, after calming down a bit, I reworked the infographic into a nonjudgmental, more informative version:
SEN. TOOMEY: “Now, one way to force it is to force insurance companies to provide health insurance coverage for someone as soon as they show up, regardless of what condition they have, which is kind of like asking the property casualty company to rebuild the house after it’s already burnt down.”
Now, aside from the obvious callousness of this statement, there's a couple of important problems with his comparison:
