It may sound strange for me to call this the "final" graph...after all, there's still data missing from the "overtime" period from all 14 of the state-based exchanges, including big ones like California and New York. Massachusetts and Rhode Island were even still allowing full open enrollment until Monday night. A few other states are still allowing "wait in line" enrollments through this Saturday.Plus, what about the special Tax Season enrollment period coming up (or even already started in a few states)? Finally, what about Idaho? Their data hasn't been updated since way back on January 17th!
MARYLAND HEALTH CONNECTION ADDING ENROLLMENT PERIOD FOR MARYLANDERS UNAWARE THEY WOULD OWE TAX PENALTY WITHOUT COVERAGE
Special Enrollment Period will run March 15 through April 30
BALTIMORE (Feb. 25, 2015) — Maryland Health Connection is allowing consumers who owe a tax penalty for not having health coverage in 2014 to still enroll for 2015 coverage through a special enrollment period that will run March 15 through April 30.
Consumers who owe or have paid a tax penalty for not having coverage in 2014 would pay a higher penalty for this year if they also did not enroll for 2015. The open enrollment period to buy a Qualified Health Plan for 2015 ended Feb. 15.
The special enrollment period is for Marylanders who must pay the penalty for lacking health insurance in 2014 and who attest that they became aware of the penalty during this income tax filing season after the Feb. 15 close of open enrollment for 2015 coverage.
My brother-in-law Brian is a home builder and architect who specializes in LEED certified construction projects. Yesterday he announced...
Received good word today that an office building that my company, Green Building Services, has been consulting on achieved LEED Silver Certification for New Construction.
This is GBS' second LEED certified project, and it's first commercial project. Another LEED certified home is in the works...
OK, these weekly estimates of HC.gov QHP enrollments probably don't mean much now that we're out of the official enrollment period, but what the heck.
On Wednesday the HHS Dept. should release the first post-deadline enrollment report, which should run through Friday, February 20th. Assuming this is the case, I'm estimating that there should have been roughly 9.0 million QHP selections even. However, the last report stated that the roughly 200,000 people who are being kicked off of their policies due to problems with their legal residency verification will be removed "in future reports after their coverage ends on February 28."
That sounds like they'll probably be included in tomorrow's report (with a similar caveat/footnote), but subtracted after that. Assuming that they yank them tomorrow after all, the "official" QHP selection total should be more like 8.8 million.
Recently, the House Republicans sent an incredibly "CHOOTZ-PAH" filled letter to HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell in which they demanded that she tell them what the HHS Dept's "contingency plan" would be in the event that the Supreme Court ends up doing their bidding by tearing away federal tax credits from up to 7.8 million people this summer.
Today, Sec. Burwell responded in the only rational way possible: By pointing out that if they're absolutely determined to destroy the lives of millions of likely voters across 37 states (including swing states like Florida, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin) while simultaneously forcing insurance premiums up an additional 35% or more for everyone else in those states, when it would literally take about 5 minutes for them to "fix" the very issue that they ginned up as the "problem" in the first place, there's not a hell of a lot that she can do to stop them.
Remember last week when the HHS Dept. announced that someone had sent out 800,000 screwed-up 1095-A tax forms? Those are the ones that those receiving ACA tax credits have to fill out to make sure that they don't have to pay anything back (or, conversely, that the IRS doesn't owe them a higher subsidy).
Out of around 4 million of these forms sent out nationally, about 20% (800K) had some sort of error regarding the benchmark policy used to calculate their correct subsidy. Of those 800K, about 50,000 people had already filed their 2014 taxes before the error was found, and originally the Treasury Dept. had said that they were going to contact each of those 50K to resolve the issue.
WASHINGTON — Taxpayers who've filed their 2014 returns only to learn that the government provided them with erroneous information on health care subsidies won't be required to submit corrected returns, the Treasury Department said Tuesday.
Long-time readers know that I've been a little obsessed with the so-called "healthcare exchange" called Florida Health Choices since last August, having posted 3-4 entries on this huge pile of Republican FAIL since then.
The short version is that before he was elected a U.S. Senator, Marco Rubio, then a member of the Florida House of Representatives, convinced his colleagues in the Florida state legislature to pony up $900,000 of taxpayer money to set up their own "healthcare exchange" to show that Republicans can outdo the Democrats when it comes to selling health insurance online, dagnabbit! Once the ACA was signed into law, "Florida Health Choices" became essentially a protest project against the Evils of All Things Obamacare.
Of course, there were a few minor problems with "Florida Health Choices", Rubio's brainchild:
It's important to stress that this is not the final enrollment report for Massachusetts; it's the final daily report, which only includes the number of people determined eligible to purchase a private policy (Medicaid enrollees, however, are instant-activation; the number listed here is the number actually enrolled as of that day).
For most of the open enrollment period, QHP selections were running around 45-50% of the total QHP determinations; the other half are people who hadn't actually completed the process or who accidentally submitted 2 applications or whatever.
However, for the final week, it's pretty safe to assume that anyone who bothered to create an account, fill out their info and submit their application was pretty likely to actually put a policy in their shopping cart and check out (as well as paying their first premium on the spot), since yesterday was the (extended) deadline to do so. Therefore, it's a pretty safe bet that all 2,816 of those listed below (of the 7,057 total, which also includes MassHealth), at a minimum, can be added to the total.
However, the actual percentage drop nationally noted in the survey caught my eye. According to Gallup:
Nationwide, the uninsured rate dropped 3.5 percentage points last year, from 17.3% to 13.8%, the lowest annualized rate across the seven years of Well-Being Index measurement. No state reported a statistically significant increase in the percentage of uninsured in 2014 compared with 2013.
