OK, today's the Big Day; Hillary Clinton has Finally, Officially, For Realz! announced that yes, she is indeed running for President of the United States in 2016.
Everyone's going nuts about it at the moment (even though it's the worst-kept secret in history). I don't have a whole lot to say about my actual feelings about her running/being the nominee yet, and I haven't even watched the launch video yet, but as a website developer, I do have 3 minor gripes and one observation about her all-new campaign website, HillaryClinton.com:
First, the quibbles:
First, while "tooltips" (the little pop-up labels when you roll over something) can be useful for link icons which aren't immediately obvious, they should never be used for text links, especially when the tooltip is exactly the same as the link itself (Iowa / Iowa). It obscures the links below it without providing any useful information.
Second, while translucent overlays can also be very effective, it's a bad idea to do this for drop-down menus, since it tends to make it more difficult to read the drop-down links over the text behind it.
Third (this is more of an "optics" thing), I'm assuming that IA, NH, NY, NV & SC are the first states to hold their primaries. While I can understand listing them first, she probably should have still listed all 50 states (along with DC, Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa & the US Virgin Islands) as well for the whole "reaching out to all Americans" vibe. Grey out the other 45+ links if need be, but list them (double-columned if necessary).
Part of the key to the successful enrollment of over 8 million* people last year and around 12 million* this year in the various ACA exchange policies has been the army of so-called "navigators" or "assisters" who, along with private health insurance brokers, helped educate millions of people about how the exchanges work, what their best options were and how to go through the procedure.
Unfortunately, some states (those run by administrations of a certain crimson hue, shall we say) decided, in their effort to obstruct Obamacare at every possible opportunity, to be utter jackasses by ginning up absurd regulations/restrictions about who "qualified" to be an ACA navigator.
This article about New Hampshire reveals 3 noteworthy bits of information: First, it looks like at least one of the 37 HC.gov states will be reporting their exchange enrollments monthly during the off-season, even if the HHS Dept. itself refuses to do so:
The New Hampshire Insurance Departmentrecently began requiring insurance companies selling plans through the marketplace to submit monthly enrollment numbers.
Second, here's the first results of those monthly reports:
According to the latest numbers, a total of 45,504 people had signed up for plans in New Hampshire by April 1
The impending King v. Burwell Supreme Court decision will cast an even larger shadow over the ACA over the next 2 months (the decision is expected to be announced in June), as exchanges in 6 of the 14 states running their own (State-Based Marketplaces, or SBMs) are at risk of either being abandoned, dissolved or otherwise moved over to the federally-run Healthcare.Gov exchange:
The federal government is threatening to take over Hawaii's health insurance exchange within months and has restricted grant money to support operations of the Hawaii Health Connector.
Jeff Kissel, the Connector's executive director, told lawmakers at a briefing Thursday that if the exchange created by the Affordable Care Act does not get state funding soon, the federal government will abolish Hawaii's marketplace and run it directly.
NewsBusters, for those who aren't familiar with it, is a right-wing nutjob "news/expose" site which prides itself on "exposing and combating liberal media bias". Think of them as the poor man's Breitbart and their fan base as that of Free Republic with less frothing at the mouth. I'm rather proud to say that they even posted a hit piece on me about a year ago.
Obamacare Penalty Starts Hitting Taxpayers, Nets Ignore in 91% of Stories
According to the February 18, Washington Post, as many as six million Americans faced the “unwelcome surprise” of a penalty 2015. Of course, many people might not have suffered that shock if the broadcast news networks had discussed the penalty more. But ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts failed to mention the tax penalty in 91.1 percent of stories (41 of 45) about the Affordable Care Act between October 1, 2014, and April 5, 2015.
Rhode Island's ACA exchange hasn't suffered from the technical glitches which are still causing problems for some states (particularly Vermont and Minnesota), but HealthSource RI does have one major problem to deal with: Funding. It's a small state with a smaller customer base for the exchange; 31,500 enrollees isn't a lot of people to cover the costs. As a result, the Governor of Rhode Island has come up with a healthcare policy tax idea which is being batted around.
The article goes into the pros and cons of the tax as opposed to simply dropping the exchange altogether and moving to Healthcare.Gov. Aside from the biggest and most obvious downside of doing so (King v. Burwell), it's also not certain that making the move would actually save any money, since HC.gov still takes some bucks to run:
Hey, remember the story from earlier about how ACA Medicaid expansion in Montana (which failed by 1 vote due to a comedy of errors resulting in a Democratic state legislator who supported the effort inadvertantly voting against it) is back on the table again and looks poised to finally go through?
Well, apparently the Koch Bros and their puppet organization, "Americans for Prosperity" (AFP), are also aware of this and have been lobbying, screaming and generally making a nuisance of themselves throughout Montana in an attempt to prevent this from happening (because God knows that 45,000 - 70,000 low-income Americans having healthcare coverage would be a horrible thing for some reason or another).
In fact, they've been so obnoxious about their efforts that the people of Montana, generally considered a fairly "red" state which you'd think would be partial to their position, have pretty much asked them to GTFO and go pound sand:
For obvious reasons, aside from whatever #ACATaxTime bump comes out of the next week or so, things will likely be pretty quiet and steady for The Graph for the rest of the year...assuming, of course, that the Supreme Court shoots down the King v. Burwell plaintiffs. If the King plaintiffs win, all bets are off and every line on the right half of the extended graph below (to the right of June) will probably look very different.
That major caveat aside, assuming that my (recently corrected) projections prove to be reasonably on the mark, this is what I'm expecting private QHP enrollments via the ACA exchanges to look like for the rest of 2015. The year should wrap up with roughly 13.7 million total QHP selections; of those, around 12.0 million will likely pay their first premium; and of those, roughly 10.0 million will likely still be enrolled (effectuated) as of December.
Here's the numeric table from which the extended graph data comes (click for higher-res version):
I'm back from a short vacation to Chicago (we had a blast, thanks for asking...visited the Shedd Aquarium, Adler Planetarium and Museum of Science & Industry), so obviously my in box has built up quite a bit of ACA news over the past week.
It'll take awhile to sift through everything, but in the meantime there are some state-specific developments which stand out:
MONTANA: A couple of years back, Montana held a vote on the ACA Medicaid expansion provision. It was a tight vote, but should have passed...unfortunately, one state legislator accidentally voted the wrong way on the bill. Seriously:
Some states have declined to expand Medicaid because they oppose Obamacare. Others worry about the financial burden of expanding the entitlement. But there appears to be only one state where the Medicaid expansion failed due to a Democratic legislator accidentally voting against it.
For months now, Michigan's implementation of the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion provision has defied expectations, enrolling far more than the 477K - 500K expected. A couple of weeks ago it managed to break the 600,000 mark, peaking at 603,681 people, and I've been wondering for quite awhile when the growth might finally stop.
Beneficiaries with Healthy Michigan Plan Coverage: 573,115
(Includes beneficiaries enrolled in health plans and beneficiaries not required to enroll in a health plan.)
*Statistics as of April 6, 2015
*Updated every Monday at 3 p.m.
