UPDATE 3/19/16: OK, the voting period is finally over (for real, this time). The bad news is that we didn'tquitecrack the Top 10 in the end; our panel ended up with 11th place (122 votes), barely missing out on the 10th spot by a mere 3 votes.
The good news is that only 10 of the 90 total panel sessions were determined by the new voting system. The remaining 80 will presumably be decided by the traditional Netroots Nation selection committee process...and ours should still have an excellent chance of being picked, for two reasons:
Regular readers may have noticed that I've been posting fairly lightly of late. Now that open enrollment is over and we're deep in the thick of primary season, I'm trying to catch up with the massive backlog which has built up in my day job.
However, there's still a lot of stuff going on; today, for instance, brought some very positive Medicaid expansion news out of two states:
The New Hampshire House on Wednesday approved legislation that would keep 48,000 people on their insurance plans by continuing the state's expanded Medicaid program beyond the end of the year.
The bill, which now goes to the Senate, includes work requirements for recipients and asks insurance companies and hospitals to cover the state's share of the program's costs.
During the official Open Enrollment Period, MNsure enrolled 85,390 Minnesotans in Qualified Health Plans. Yesterday they held their March board meeting and updated their numbers through the first 5 weeks of the off season:
During Open Enrollment, MNsure averaged 928 QHP selections per day. During the off season, this has dropped down to 42 per day, or about 4.5% of the OE3 daily average.
If you extrapolate this nationally (and of course there's no way of knowing whether Minnesota is remotely representative), that would translate to around 6,200 people selecting exchange-based QHPs per day during the off season, which is lower than the past two years (7,000 - 9,000/day) but certainly within reason.
Oregon is considering proposals by four companies to provide a new software platform for the state’s health insurance marketplace.
The state uses the federal insurance exchange, http://www.Healthcare.gov, and state officials began to explore other options after the federal government decided to begin charging insurance companies a fee to use the exchange in Oregon.
Oregon has used the federal platform since its own insurance portal, Cover Oregon, failed to launch in 2013. The state and technology company Oracle, which built the Cover Oregon system, are still engaged in a legal battle over who is to blame for the problems.
OK, this is not only off topic, it's not even a particularly significant issue, but it bugs me because...well, frankly, because it's about my hometown.
Over on Twitter, several pundits/reporters have made this claim:
Trump dominated Oakland County Michigan, which includes Mitt Romney's hometown. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ pic.twitter.com/wcsBcbFz7h
I wrote a lot about Matt Bevin during the Kentucky gubernatorial campaign last fall, as well as after he won the election, was sworn in as governor, and started doing his best to screw up stuff which wasn't broken. As you'll recall, when it came to the Affordable Care Act and the state ACA exchange (kynect), Bevin originally promised that he was going to kill the kynect exchange completely (even though there's no reason to do so, it's been operating smoothly for years and has excellent branding in the state) as well as killing the ACA Medicaid expansion (even though, again, it's been a huge success in the state at no cost to them so far and only pennies on the dollar going forward).
H&R Block says health care law fines have more than doubled
Many people who went without health insurance last year are now seeing fines more than double under President Barack Obama’s health care law, H&R Block said Tuesday.
The Kansas City-based tax preparation company said that among its customers who owe a penalty for the 2015 tax year, the average fine is $383. That compares with $172 for 2014, the company said in a report that marked the halfway point in the current tax season.
As of the end of the third open enrollment under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), 12.7 million people had signed up for coverage in the health insurance marketplaces, up from 11.7 million last year and 8.0 million in 2014.
Actual enrollment will end up somewhat lower than this because some people will not pay their premiums or will have their coverage terminated due to inconsistencies on their applications, and there is typically additional attrition as the year progresses (e.g., as some enrollees get jobs with health benefits). For example, in 2015 paid enrollees totaled 10.2 million as of end of March and 9.3 million as of the end of September. If a similar pattern holds, actual enrollment should end 2016 over 10 million, which was the target established by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). (There are reasons to believe that attrition may be lower this year, including the fact that terminations occurring during open enrollment have already been subtracted from official signup figures, which was not the case previously.)
While enrollment is in line with the HHS target announced in advance of this year’s open enrollment, it is short of earlier projections by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which became an implicit yardstick for judging the law. In March 2015, CBO projected average monthly marketplace enrollment of 21 million in calendar year 2016, though recently lowered that forecast to 13 million.
In this analysis, we look at why enrollment may be lower than projected by CBO and discuss the potential for future enrollment growth.
In a phone call, [Sen. Sanders's policy director Warren] Gunnels explained the $1.1 trillion gap. It comes down to five factors:
...Sanders assumes $324 billion more per year in prescription drug savings than Thorpe does. Thorpe argues that this is wildly implausible. "In 2014 private health plans paid a TOTAL of $132 billion on prescription drugs and nationally we spent $305 billion," he writes in an email. "With their savings drug spending nationally would be negative." (Emphasis mine.) The Sanders camp revised the number down to $241 billion when I pointed this out.
...When I pointed out that the yearly savings numbers they were presenting on prescription drugs were literally impossible, the Sanders camp revised the number to $241 billion — huge and arguably implausible but not larger than total annual spending on prescription drugs.
6/10/16: REPOSTED FROM THE ARCHIVES AS A REMINDER.
Yes, this is off topic. No, I don't care tonight.
Yes, the entire Republican debate was a revolting, disgusting, putrid embarrassment from start to finish (with the odd exception of the moderators from FOX News, who actually did a great job).
However, forget about the discussion of Donald Trump's penis size which opened the evening (no, I'm not making that up, and no, it's not a metaphor).
