As I've stated many, many times before: In spite of their $300 million disaster of a website failing to enroll a single person, Oregon has still managed to rack up one of the most impressive enrollment tallies in the entire country relative to their population, with a grand total of over 481,000 people added between QHPs, Medicaid and CHIP (in addition to the 353,000 noted at the link, OR added another 128K to Medicaid via their "fast track" program which they don't list here for whatever reasons).
For a state with only 3.9 million people, that's bound to have an impressive impact on the uninsured rate...and sure enough...
Another Big Number story today on top of the national and Illinois ones. My most recent numbers for California Medicaid expansion had it pegged at around 1.4 million "strict expansion" and around 600K "woodworkers" as of late June. However, that was just an estimate.
This article about a class action lawsuit being filed over the massive Medi-Cal backlog (down to 350K from a whopping 900K back in May) is mostly negative for obvious reasons. However, there's an interesting data point in the middle of it:
According to state officials, 2.2 million new Medi-Cal members were added as a result of the Obamacare healthcare expansion, bringing the total number of participants in the program to about 11 million.
State Department of Health Care Services spokesman Norman Williams said that as of Sept. 1, 350,000 applications remained backed up in the enrollment system. That system has been plagued by computer troubles that have stymied county government efforts to verify patients' Medi-Cal eligibility.
The backlog was as large as 900,000 earlier in the summer.
Now, before anyone claims that I'm "wrong" about the paid number being 7.3 million instead of 8.07 million, read the tweet carefully: I says that 7.3 million were enrolled as of August 15th. In other words, that's the net number after subtracting those who've dropped their coverage after 1, 2, 3 or more months.
In a new 60-second ad, Kentucky Senate candidate Alison Lundegran Grimes finally goes after opponent Mitch McConnell regarding his repeated attempts to damage/weaken Medicare. It isn't really connected to the Kynect = Obamacare = ACA issue, but it's in the ballpark, anyway:
The ad seems to have gotten under the skin of the McConnell campaign; they're actually attacking her grandfather for having a stroke:
.@Team_Mitch "Any1 who would use their grandfather's stroke" 2 reintroduce false ads "has run out of justification 4 their candidacy" #KYSen
A ton of great ACA news coming out of Connecticut this morning, courtesy of Arielle Levin Becker (posted in reverse-chronological order, newest at the top):
Arielle Levin Becker provides some updated numbers out of Connecticut, which is great...but I'll have to do some calculations to parse the data out for my purposes:
Current Access Health membership: 76,094 in private insurance, 207,020 in Medicaid (total Medicaid enrollment is much higher)
OK, so those are the current enrollment numbers. 76,094 QHPs is 4% net attrition from the 4/19 total of 79,192, or less than 0.8% per month, which is fantastic.
However, since that 76K figure combines both additions and subtractions (ie, it's the net total, not gross), I can't really tell what the cumulative total is, which is what I use for my off-season projection chart.
Then there's the ones who try to take credit for Medicaid expansion finally being put into effect even though it was their own ineptness which dragged the process out...in the case of Michigan, needlessly putting hundreds of thousands of people through 3 months of unnecessary anxiety and medical risk while costing the state hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funds in the process:
Washington hospitals provided nearly $154 million less in charity care in the first half of this year than in the first half of 2013, in many cases boosting the hospitals’ bottom lines.
Hospitals attributed the plunge in charity care — about 30 percent — to the Affordable Care Act’s focus on reducing the number of uninsured patients.
This year, for the first time, low-income and uninsured patients whose care was previously covered under hospitals’ charity-care programs were able under the ACA to qualify for Medicaid coverage or subsidized private insurance.
