• NEW JERSEY: Christie: Congress should 'fix' Obamacare if U.S. Supreme Court ends subsidies

If the U.S. Supreme Court decides later this month that 34 states including New Jersey are not permitted to share in federal subsidies used to lower the cost of Obamacare premiums, Gov. Chris Christie said Congress should "fix" the law to preserve the money.

The Republican governor and unannounced presidential candidate has been critical of the Affordable Care Act, calling it a "failed" program last year.

But when asked what he thinks ought to be done if the nation's highest court rules that only the 16 states that operate their own "exchanges" — an online hub to sell health insurance coverage — can receive subsidies, Christie did not call for rolling back the program.

"Congress should fix it," Christie said speaking outside the Corner View Restaurant in Concord, N.H. "If Congress messed up the statute, the Congress and the President created the statute; they should fix it. If they're saying it's not what they intended, then go back and fix it."

In 2014, Hawaii's enrollment numbers were pretty bad, but they were at least consistent: About 400 through the end of November; 2,200 at the end of December; 3,600 at the end of January, 4,600 at the end of February and about 8,600 through mid-April. Their cumulative total through the end of the off-season last year was just shy of 11,000, which again, was pretty in line with what I'd expect.

As you can see from the reposts below, for 2015, Hawaii's numbers have been all over the place, making sense some days and completely out of whack on others. The official HHS Dept. ASPE report has Hawaii with 12,635 QHPs selected for 2015 as of Feb. 21st...which sound about right to me (ie, that's a pretty lame number, but it's still around a 47% increase over 2014). Then, a few days ago, CMS released the effectuated enrollment numbers as of 3/31. For Hawaii, this number is 8,200...a 35% drop. While that's a disturbingly heavy drop (the other states averaged just a 13% "drop" overall), it's at least plausible.

It appears that at while most of the 34 states on the federal exchange have spent the past 5 months wandering around aimlessly, at least two of them did pay attention last November when the Supreme Court, to the astonishment of anyone with an ounce of sanity, agreed to take up the King v. Burwell case.

Tom Wolf, the newly-elected (Democratic) Governor of Pennsylvania, announced back in March that yes, he would absolutely push to "establish" a state ACA exchange in the event of a King plaintiff win, and earlier this week he made good on this by formally submitting an application to the HHS Dept.:

Pennsylvania became the first state Tuesday to publicly put in motion a back-up plan to protect its federal health insurance subsidies in the event the Supreme Court dismantles a key part of President Obama’s health care law.

A couple of days ago, the CMS division of the HHS Dept. released a huge data dump on effectuated ACA exchange enrollment data through March 31st, 2015.

Among the major takeaways was that as of 3/31/15, effectuated (ie, active/paid for) private policy enrollments via the ACA exchanges stood at 10,187,197 people.

The spin on this via both the New York Times and the McClatchy Washington Bureau is that this means that "13% Left Health Care Rolls" (the Times) or, alternately, that "U.S. marketplace health plan enrollment falls to 10.2 million" (McClatchy).

Depending on your perspective, neither of these are accurate (although the first headline is worse; "13% left healthcare rolls" makes it sound as though over 40 million people suddenly became uninsured nationally).

• Revisiting Oral Arguments In The King v. Burwell Obamacare Supreme Court Case

• New York Assembly votes in favor of universal health coverage

• Why we need stronger coverage of Covered California

• Medicaid director: Cost of care is down

• Doe-Anderson president attributes kynect success to simplicity

• Proposals to extend marketplace subsidies would only delay damage

• With Medi-Cal ranks swelling, health care industry funds campaign to raise rates

Yes, if you look at the top of the page, you'll see the seconds ticking away until the Supreme Court finally announces whether 6.5 million lower- to middle-class Americans get hammered with a $3,200 (average) annual tax hike apiece thanks to a joint effort by the Cato Institute and the Republican Party.

As of this writing, the countdown clock reads 24 Days, 18 Hours, 14 Minutes and 27 Seconds. 21 Days, 0 Hours, 48 Minutes, 21 Seconds. However, the Court's decision could be announced as soon as 4 days from now! 1 Hour from now! Commenter "secretadvocate" noted that according to the Supreme Court's calendar, they plan on making their Major Decision announcements on each Monday of June. Since they took a pass on King a few days ago, that leaves 4 possible dates for the Big Announcement:

You don't hear a whole lot about the other ACA healthcare exchange system, the Small Business Health Options Program (SHOP, although it should really be "SBHOP" which looks like a typo). In fact, to my knowledge, the HHS Dept. has never said a peep about the SHOP numbers in any of their official reports or press releases. There's a reason.

Rhode Island just made an announcement about their SHOP program. RI only has a total population of just over 1.05 million people anyway. so 3,500 people enrolled in the state's Small Business exchange policies actually isn't too bad, really (for comparison, this would be the equivalent of California enrolling around 128,000 people in theirs).

I just posted 2 different ways which media outlets can write up stories about the 2016 insurance premium rate requests.

One, from CNN Money, took an alarmist stance in the headline, but the article itself--while still angled towards the high increase end--was technically accurate.

The second, from Capital New York, was more complete and accurate including the proper context (it included all companies and weighted them by market share, as opposed to partial, skewed data). It also had a less sexy, but far more accurate headline.

There's also a third way to present the story: Making crap up, aka lying about it.

Thanks to commentor "pilon" for the head's up on this silliness from some right-wing outfit called the "Washington Policy Center" (I'm not gonna link to them, but I'll include the URL in the screen shot):

Over the past couple of weeks, I've posted a bunch of entries both here and over at healthinsurance.org about not freaking out when you see "OMG!!! MASSIVE OBAMACARE RATE HIKES NEXT YEAR WE'RE ALL GONNA DIIIIIIIIE!!!"-style headlines such as this giant one from CNN Money:

The angle being played is emphasized right off the bat with the big, scary-looking graphic above the story:

Even the sub-headline pushes the hair-on-fire meme:

While everyone is waiting for the King v. Burwell decision to come out in a few weeks, the CMS Dept. has quietly released their latest monthly Medicaid/CHIP enrollment report...which happens to line up almost perfectly with what I was expecting:

• Nearly 71.1 million individuals were enrolled in Medicaid and CHIP in March 2015. This enrollment count is point-in-time (on the last day of the month) and includes all enrollees in the Medicaid and CHIP programs who are receiving a comprehensive benefit package.
• 534,845 additional people were enrolled in March 2015 as compared to February 2015 in the 51 states that reported comparable March and February 2015 data.
• Looking at the additional enrollment since October 2013 when the initial Marketplace open enrollment period began, among the 49 states reporting both March 2015 enrollment data and data from July-September of 2013, over 12.2 million additional individuals are enrolled in Medicaid and CHIP as of March 2015, an approximately 21.2 percent increase over the average monthly enrollment for July through September of 2013.9 (Connecticut and Maine are not included in this count.)