I wrote a couple of posts last week about the ongoing Health Republic of New York Co-Op meltdown, which has quickly gone from being just-another-Co-Op-closure to a complete disaster for up to 166,000 New York residents, primarily because unlike the other Co-Ops which are at least covering their existing enrollees through the end of December, Health Republic is now having the plug pulled out at the end of November, which gives current enrollees just 8 days to scramble to find new coverage for the last month of 2015.
This was made worse by the fact that the November 30 cut-off wasn't even announced until October 30, and even then, the powers that be in the NY Dept. of Insurance, NY State of Health exchange and Health Republic itself didn't appear to treat this development with any particular sense of urgency. I mean yes, they posted notices about it and supposedly sent out letters to all 166,000 people, but an awful lot of those people didn't appear to have received those notices as of a few days ago. Hell, until a day or two ago the NY State of Health website didn't even have anything posted about the 11/30 cut-off at all.
Well, I've been screaming bloody murder about the situation, as have others, and it seems to be getting some butts moving...but I'm not sure how helpful any of it will be.
Unlike the federal exchange (HealthCare.gov) and many of the state-based exchanges which have experienced massive technical problems to some degree or another over the past two years (Oregon, Nevada and Hawaii have gone kaput; Massachusetts & Maryland had to be completely rebuilt; Vermonts is still iffy), the Kentucky ACA exchange website, aka "kynect" (lower-case intentional), has been chugging along smoothly since Day One on October 1, 2013. It's fully self-sufficient, well known and trusted by Kentuckians, and has been an amazingly successful venture in general.
Speaking in his first public comments since he was elected governor of Kentucky on Tuesday, Matt Bevin repeated his pledge to dismantle kynect, the state’s health insurance exchange that has been hailed as a national model.
“My intent is to have it wound down by the end of next year,” Bevin said of the online service people use to shop for health coverage or determine whether they are eligible for Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act.
NOTE: I am very much aware that simply "mashing up" 2 different surveys and splitting the difference is not a statistically professional way to do this, but it's the best I can do for the moment.
Back in July, after Gallup released their quarterly survey finding the U.S. uninsured rate to have dropped to 11.4% for adults 18 and older, I posted a more detailed graph which also separated out people caught in the Medicaid Gap as well as uninsured Undocumented Immigrants (who aren't eligible for either the ACA exchanges or Medicaid/CHIP, except for children in California...and I presume the new CA law doesn't start until January). Here's what the chart looked like at the time:
Health insurance premiums will increase on average 7 percent in Colorado in 2016, according to statistics compiled by the state division that reviewed and approved plans for the coming year.
...Consumers who purchased through Connect for Health Colorado, the state health insurance exchange, in 2015 who aren’t eligible for tax credits will see an average increase of 12 percent if they simply renew their current plan for 2016.
Look, the later part of the article talks about the form in question itself, IRS Form 8962, being overly complicated, and perhaps it is. It's 2 pages, and while it's certainly not as bad as some other federal tax forms, I can definitely see it being intimidating to those who are used to just filling out the 1040-EZ form, as I did years ago. Comic strips and sitcoms have used the "Taxes Are Hard!!" meme as comedic fodder for decades. So no, I'm not going to berate anyone complaining about the form being difficult to fill out.
HOWEVER, complaining about having to file a tax return AT ALL? You're receiving thousands of dollars in tax credits and you didn't think you'd have to fill out a tax form in order to prove your eligibility?
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The uninsured rate among U.S. adults aged 18 and older was 11.4% in the second quarter of 2015, down from 11.9% in the first quarter. The uninsured rate has dropped nearly six percentage points since the fourth quarter of 2013, just before the requirement for Americans to carry health insurance took effect.
...Again, it's safe to assume that this has gone down as well, although probably not as dramatically as for adults. A similar 36.7% drop would be around 2.2 million children (taking population increase into effect), but even half of that would still lop a good million children off the uninsured tally...or an additional 0.3% of the total population.
In other words, it's likely that the actual uninsured rate for the entire U.S. population (all 320 million of us) is down to around 28 million adults + 4.9 million children, around 33 million total...or 10.3% of the entire population.
Oh, wait...no, it's actually just The Graph, officially returning for the third go-around.
I know, I know; you're looking at this and saying "How the hell is he getting 230,000 nationally when he's only confirmed around 8,700?"
Simple. In fact, as I explained earlier today, it's entirely possible that the national total is much higher than 230K already--it could potentially be up to as high as 800,000 or more already. Here's a simplified explanation:
The dozen collapses will disrupt insurance for 740,000 individuals and small-business employees, who are being instructed by state and federal officials to choose new plans in time for them to take effect in January. In New York state, the window is narrower. Government officials have moved up the closing date of the New York Health Republic co-op, the nation’s largest, giving its more than 200,000 members just two weeks to select different coverage before it shuts down at the end of this month.
Although it lost money in 2014, New Mexico Health Connections is “financially very strong” with strong cash reserves, CEO Martin Hickey said Wednesday. In fact, the co-op expects to greatly expand by picking up consumers who had been insured with Blue Cross Blue Shield New Mexico on the state health exchange. Blue Cross is not offering individual insurance policies on the exchange for 2016.
“Our competitors don’t want to believe it necessarily, but we’re financially healthy,” Hickey said. “We’re going to be here for a very long time.”
OK, this isn't an official exchange update, and it only covers the "first hour after opening" on Sunday, but aside from Maryland, this is the only hard number I have so far; from Sunday's Wall St. Journal:
The federal exchange, HealthCare.gov, opened for business Sunday and will serve 38 states that rely on the marketplace. California’s state-run exchange is launching a 38-stop bus tour to get the word out about signing up and re-enrolling for coverage. Minnesota’s exchange had a couple hundred people sign up in the first hour after opening in the morning with no signs of any technology problems.
“We’re not expecting a whole lot of enrollment because it’s a 60 degree day on a Sunday, but so far so good,” said Shane Delaney, a spokesman for MNsure. The state exchange has hundreds of brokers and navigators geared up to assist consumers.
OK, that's a bare minimum of 200 QHP selections as of 10am (I'm guessing) on Nov. 1st in Minnesota. Duly noted.
One of the arguments Kentucky Governor-elect Matt Bevin has made in favor of killing off the wildly successful, smoothly-operating kynect state-based ACA exchange has been that doing so would "save Kentucky money". The idea is that by shifting everything over to the federal exchange at HealthCare.Gov, the state of Kentucky would save the cost of operating their own exchange.
In one sense, this is true; kynect is currently supported by a flat 1% charge for all premiums on all individual policies sold in Kentucky, both "inside and outside of the marketplace." In other words. whether you enroll in a individual policy either via Kynect or directly through the insurance carrier, they're tacking on a 1% surcharge to your premiums to pay for the exchang to operate. So, yes, dropping kynect would also stop that 1% fee from being charged.
