A week or so ago, U of Michigan assistant law professor Nicholas Bagley and his associate, Boston U. public health asst. professor David K. Jones) posted a lengthy, comprehensive analysis of potential post-King v. Burwell options for the HHS Dept. and/or the impacted states in the event that the Supreme Court rules in favor of the plaintiffs. As I noted at the time, several of their points were very close to my own last July...except that I was just shooting off at the mouth, whereas they actually know what they're talking about, legally speaking.
What if HHS declared that any state that performs substantial, ongoing, and essential exchange functions has established an exchange, even if the state never formally elected to do so?
Last year, Connecticut was a perfect example of how the initial requested insurance policy rate changes from the companies involved in a given state can end up changing dramatically after the approval process (and in CT's case, change even more when the actual Open Enrollment period actually arrives). The original requested average increas in CT was 12.8%, but the approved changes ended up only being around 4.5%...and in the end they were far lower: Less than a 1% overall weighted average increase!
With that in mind, here's the story on 2016 requested changes in CT:
Four major health care providers that offer plans on Connecticut's health insurance marketplace have filed for rate increases for the upcoming open enrollment period that begins Nov. 1, 2015.
...The following increases have been proposed: 2 percent for ConnectiCare, 6.7 percent for Anthem, 12.4 percent for United Healthcare and 13.96 percent for Healthy CT.
Assuming this ratio hasn't shifted much over the past 6 years, around 28% of the total U.S. population are mothers
Obviously women over 64 (mostly on Medicare) are much more likely than the general population to be mothers...but girls under 18 are far less likely to be (well...under 16, anyway...the birth rate varies from state to state, of course), so I'm assuming that these cancel each other out, resulting in that 28% rate hopefully being roughly accurate.
On the one hand, Washington State, like Oregon, has a nifty, easy-to-use web-based searchable database for their 2016 rate request filings, yay!
On the other hand, when you get into the details, some of it can be pretty confusing stuff. In 2014, there were 8 companies approved for the WA exchange. For 2015, there were 10 companies, plus 2 more which didn't make the cut. For 2016, a total of 17 companies/subsidiaries have requested approval to sell on the individual market. There's no guarantee that all 17 will be approved to sell in the state, but I'm assuming they all will be for the time being.
There's actually 18 listings, however, because Lifewise split their policies into two entries...one of which is "grandfathered" policies only, and is therefore not relevant for the table below...although this does answer the question "how many people are sill enrolled in Grandfathered policies in Washington State?" The answer appears to be just 15,677 people...out of 343,348 total in the individual market, or only 4.5% of the total.
Since I made such a fuss over Colbeck's jaw-dropping laundry list of factual errors and omissions, I figure it behooves me to give the same scrutiny to the follow-up from a "union boss". Let's take a look:
They said it wouldn’t work.
They said no one wanted it.
They said it would destroy the economy.
They said it would create chaos in the healthcare industry and cause masses of people to lose their insurance.
They said no one would sign up for it; especially healthy and young people.
They even said it would lead to “death panels” deciding who will live or die under Obamacare.
From "It'll Destroy America!!" to "It Doesn't Suck But It Will Someday!" in 10 Easy Steps
1. October 2013: "No one can enroll!!"
(ok, this one is a gimme; the technical mess at HC.gov and some of the state exchanges did make it almost impossible for anyone to sign up the first month.)
Just as House lawmakers were putting together their annual “trains” — cramming multiple, tangentially related bills into hundreds of pages of amendments so they could pass them all at the 11th hour — a funny thing happened. They upped and quit.
On April 27, House Speaker Steve Crisafulli prematurely banged his gavel, ending the session, leaving the Senate holding the bag on this year’s biggest, most contentious issue: Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act. Now a group of Senate Democrats has sued the GOP-dominated House, and as of this writing, the Florida Supreme Court says the lower chamber must explain its abrupt adjournment.
In a nutshell, the House doesn’t want Medicaid expansion but the Senate does. The upper chamber has a nifty non-Medicaid name for it, too. The Florida Health Insurance Exchange (or FHIX) is, in name, an attempt to help GOP senators get past the program’s unpalatable association with “Obamacare.”
OK, I just got this and it just went live, so I'm just now reading it as I'm typing this...call it "liveblogging" if you will...(Update 6:00pm: OK, pretty much done now)
4 p.m., ET, Wednesday
May 6, 2015
STUDY FINDS HEALTH COVERAGE GROWS UNDER AFFORDABLE CARE ACT
Insurance coverage has increased across all types of insurance since the major provisions of the federal Affordable Care Act took effect, with a total of 16.9 million people becoming newly enrolled through February 2015, according to a new RAND Corporation study.
Researchers estimate that from September 2013 to February 2015, 22.8 million Americans became newly insured and 5.9 million lost coverage, for a net of 16.9 million newly insured Americans.
Among those newly gaining coverage, 9.6 million people enrolled in employer-sponsored health plans, followed by Medicaid (6.5 million), the individual marketplaces (4.1 million), nonmarketplace individual plans (1.2 million) and other insurance sources (1.5 million).
...it could actually be several hundred dollars lower.
A week ago I posted a story in which I busted Michigan State Senator Patrick Colbeck for blatantly spewing nonsense numbers about the ACA in an Op-Ed in the Detroit News.
Yesterday, my follow-up story, about the Detroit News allowing Colbeck to go back in and correct some (but not all) of his insanely false factual garbage a solid 10 days later (while failing to give any indication about just how absurdly wrong he had been in the first place) went viral, generating more visitors than any other story I've posted in months.
After an all-day saga, the end result was that the Detroit News finally posted a "correction" notice...except they did so in such a disingenous way (and so long after the original editorial was publshed) as to be nearly meaningless.
I actually missed this report a few days ago, partially because I thought the February report had already been released a few weeks back; it turns out I was thinking of January's.
For January I overshot the mark a bit, but for February my projections were pretty much bang-on target, with an net incrase of 12.65 million Medicaid/CHIP enrollees to date thanks to the ACA. But wait, you're saying: The report says the net gain is only 11.7 million!
Yes, that's true...except that the 11.7 million figure only includes ACA-enabled Medicaid/CHIP additions since expansion started on 1/1/14:
