The conservative Republican Study Committee (RSC) on Friday submitted its recommendations for a Republican replacement for ObamaCare as it seeks to shape a plan being formed by a group of House chairmen.
The recommendations come from the RSC’s already-existing legislation, the American Health Care Reform Act, which would completely repeal ObamaCare and replace it with a new system.
AT LAST!! A completely new "system"! Let's take a look:
The proposal would replace ObamaCare’s refundable tax credits with a tax deduction, which tends to provide less help to low-income people by reducing the taxes people owe rather than allowing for the possibility of getting money back in a refund.
Ah, yes...because "less help" is exactly what low income people need most these days. Go on...
In a classic case of missing the forest for the trees, I posted two very wonky, detailed entries over the past couple of days about Minnesota and Connecticut's latest enrollment numbers...but completely missed one crucially important data point.
There's a bunch of different numbers there, but as far as I can tell, the one I'm looking for is "Effectuated Enrollments with APTC/CSR (medical)" combined with "Effectuated Enrollments Without APTC/CSR (medical)". That's 69,519 + 46,371 = 115,890 effectuated, individual, medical QHP enrollees as of 3/31/16.
Based on that discrepancy, the MA Health Connector has increased their enrollment by either a nominal 0.6% or an impressive 9.5%, depending on what you use as the starting number.
Well, this morning I've found a similar report for the Washington exchange, and this one makes even less sense to me because it not only contradicts the ASPE report, it seems to contradict the WA exchange itself.
I noted last month that the Massachusetts Health Connector had increased their effectuated QHP enrollee total by around 12,000 people in the first month of the off season, which goes against the expected net attition expected once Open Enrollment ends.
However, I also noted that MA is unusual in that most of their exchange QHPs are in the form of "ConnectorCare" plans, which are availble for enrollment year round, just like Medicaid and SHOP enrollment. As a result, this increase, while legitimate, can not be used to extrapolate anything nationally.
As everyone who's been following the ACA over the past few years knows, the October 2013 launch of HealthCare.Gov and 16 state-based marketplace websites was not one of the prouder moments in the Obama administration's history. The federal exchange (which covered 35 states at the time) was a disaster out of the gate, as well about half of the state-based websites.
Over the past three Open Enrollment Periods, of course, most of the technical headaches have been worked out of most of the sites. HealthCare.Gov operates like a dream now (update: well, relatively speaking, anyway) and major improvements have been made in most of the state exchanges as well. In 5 cases, the solution was to either scrap the original platform and start over (Maryland and Massachusetts) or to say "to hell with it", drop their own platform completely and move home to the Mothership (Oregon and Nevada in 2015; Hawaii starting this year). Washington State kept their own platform but gave up trying to handle billing for their enrollees, joining just about every other state in letting the carriers handle payments directly.
Tracking ACA Enrollments: Figuring Out How Many Grandfathered/Grandmothered Plan Are Still Around
In this week’s entry, Charles Gaba of ACASignups.net gives us a breakdown of a tally of Grandfathered and Grandmothered plans in the individual market. He did, in his own words, a “back of the envelope” calculation and, with input from Louise Norris of healthinsurance.org, came up with an estimate of those old plans still hanging around. Charles says, “My Conclusion? There should be roughly 1 million people still enrolled in Grandfathered policies and perhaps 1.5 million in Transitional/Grandmothered plans today.”
The go-to journalist in Connecticut for all things Obamacare-related is Arielle Levin Becker. Judging from her feed this AM, it sounds like she's livetweeting the monthly AccessHealthCT board meeting. Here's her key points:
CT exchange enrollment down about 9.2 percent from end of open enrollment. Also about 2% shift from subsidized to unsubsidized.
During the official Open Enrollment Period, MNsure enrolled 85,390 Minnesotans in Qualified Health Plans. Unlike most of the state exchanges (and HC.gov itself), MNsure has been dutifully continuing to update their data every month or so during the off season, providing an interesting glimpse into how the Special Enrollment Period (SEP) is going:
3/07/16 - 4/17/16: 90,696 QHPs Cumulative since 11/01/15 (+3,840, or 91/day); 55,357 MNcare; 156,983 Medicaid
Didja notice that? While the private QHP enrollment rate obviously dropped off tremendously after open enrollment closed (duh!), the SEP enrollment rate has dramatically increased since then, from 21/day in early February, to 55/day in late Feb/early March, to 91 per day over the past month. While it's still just 10% of the Open Enrollment rate, over 4x as many people are signing up for QHPs via MNsure now as were at the start of the off season.
