Michigan continues to astound. Remember, the official estimates of how many Michiganders are eligible for ACA Medicaid expansion ranged from 477K - 500K.
Healthy Michigan Plan Enrollment Statistics
Beneficiaries with Healthy Michigan Plan Coverage: 596,246
(Includes beneficiaries enrolled in health plans and beneficiaries not required to enroll in a health plan.)
*Statistics as of March 23, 2015
*Updated every Monday at 3 p.m.
That's as much as 25% higher than the number supposedly eligible for the program.
This article is a bit outdated (it's from March 3rd); thanks to Andrew Sprung for finding it for me. Apparently over 200,000 people are now enrolled in Pennsylvania's "Healthy PA" program, which is the "alternative" Medicaid expansion plan set up by GOP Governor Tom Corbett prior to new Democratic Governor Tom Wolf taking charge. Wolf is in the process of flipping the program back to "standard" Medicaid expansion, but is running into a few snags:
Under former Gov. Tom Corbett's Healthy Pennsylvania program, the state built a second Medicaid managed-care system, separate from its HealthChoices Medicaid system that serves about 1.6 million residents. About 600,000 residents are eligible for the expanded coverage and about 200,000 have enrolled.
Among the more amusing tidbits surrounding Texas Senator and Joseph McCarthy Impersonator* Ted Cruz is the revelation that he foolishly never bothered registering TedCruz.com, with hilarious consequences.
Of course, he also failed to register other domains such as TedCruzForAmerica.com or (for those who don't know how to spell his name) TedCruze.com.
A new competitor entered the Idaho market this year, with a different business model. The Mountain Health CO-OP is Idaho's first Consumer Operated and Oriented Plan - a type of nonprofit organization authorized by the Affordable Care Act and supported with federal seed money.
The co-op's first year in Idaho yielded about 19,000 members by mid-March, with an additional 2,700 who hadn't yet paid their premiums. Most enrolled through the state exchange.
Mountain Health CO-OP expects to charge premiums high enough to allow it to avoid losing money, said spokeswoman Karen Early. "We are trying to have the lowest administrative cost we can," she said. The co-op expects its overhead and profits to be "well under" the 20 percent allowed by the law.
Thanks to HonestyinGov for giving me a heads up (via Twitter) to this Wall St. Journal article by Stephanie Armour the other day regarding a new survey (and several interviews with tax preparers) which claims that overall, those who will owe a tax penalty for not being insured last year and are still uninsured this year are not likely to go ahead and enroll during the 2015 tax filing season currently ongoing:
Major tax-preparation firms say many customers are paying the penalty and not getting health insurance. It is still early, since the special enrollment period launched Sunday, but research also suggests that many people who lack health insurance will pay the penalty and not get covered this year.
Only 12% of uninsured people would buy policies if informed of the penalty, according to a survey of 3,000 adults polled through Feb. 24 by McKinsey & Co.’s Center for U.S. Health System Reform.
Over on another comment thread, one ACA Signups regular is trying to parse out the question of "newly insured" vs. "previously insured" enrollees as they relate to both the ACA exchanges as well as Medicaid expansion. He admits to being surprised that I'm comfortable stating that "only" about 5-6 million of the current exchange enrollees are "newly insured" as opposed to "previously insured". I tried to explain both the numbers as well as the methodology headaches, but also decided this issue is worthy of a full entry, so here goes:
Meet Bob. Bob is married with 2 kids. In 2013, Bob was 64, his 2nd wife was 42, their son from Bob's first marriage was 24 and their daughter together was 15.
Bob had quite a year in 2014.
In December 2013, Bob and his wife, who had been uninsured for the past year, discovered that they qualified for Medicaid thanks to the ACA's expansion provision in their state. Their 15-year old daughter was already enrolled in the CHIP program, and their son was scrimping by on a junk "policy". Bob and his wife enrolled in Medicaid, effective January 1st.
Here's another one of the "A-list" talking points that ACA critics have been lobbing for several years now: Supposedly, egregious regulations for employer-basd healthcare coverage would "force" thousands of large/medium-sized companies to drop their coverage entirely, throwing their employees over to the heatlhcare exchanges and taking the $2,000 per head tax hit for not providing coverage instead.
Hmmm...looks like I overshot the mark a bit this time around, but still impressive growth in Medicaid/CHIP enrollment:
From the report:
The 51 states (including the District of Columbia) that provided enrollment data for January 2015 reported nearly 70 million individuals were enrolled in Medicaid and CHIP.6 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.
394,023 additional people were enrolled in January 2015 as compared to December 2014 in the 51 states that reported comparable January 2015 and December 2014 data.7
(And yes, the "51 states" wording is CMS's, not mine)
Ways and means chairman says GOP is moving ahead on alternative to health law
WASHINGTON—Rep. Paul Ryan urged state lawmakers to resist setting up state insurance exchanges if the Supreme Court rules that key parts of the Affordable Care Act can only continue if they do so.
“Oh God, no…The last thing anybody in my opinion would want to do, even if you are not a conservative, is consign your state to this law,” the Wisconsin Republican told state legislators Thursday during a conference call organized by the...
Earlier today, the CMS/HHS Dept. held a press call to discuss the #ACATaxTime Special Enrollment Period for people who missed the open enrollment deadline this year, had to pay the non-coverage tax penalty last year and "didn't know" about the penalty until it was too late. They also discussed the exciting world of the 1095-A tax form. That's the one you fill out if you received federal ACA exchange policy tax credits for 2014; you have to reconcile what you thought your income would be with your actual income to see whether you have to pay anything back or receive a higher credit.
As you may recall, there was a bit of a problem with roughly 820,000 of the 1095-A forms; they had the wrong benchmark plan listed, which screwed up the formula used to calculate the subsidy for the tax filer, so they originally told those folks to hang tight until they received the corrected form.
