The new GAO study shows that, instead, taxpayers are subsidizing abortions. Customers in five states have no abortion-free plans available to them, and in many states, customers can't tell which plans cover abortion and which don't.
...Fifteen issuers and the Washington Health Benefit Exchange ... did not itemize the premium amount associated with non-excepted abortion services coverage on enrollees’ bills nor indicate that they send a separate bill for that premium amount.
One of last week's big ACA stories was the news that the largest insurance company on Minnesota's exchange, PreferredOne, was dropping out of MNsure.
ACA critics pounced all over this news as Yet More Proof That Obamacare Is Failing®, even though pretty much every "proof" they've presented to date has turned out to be nonsense or, at best, vastly exaggerated (never mind, either, the fact that overall, 77 new insurers are joining the ACA exchanges while only 15 are dropping out, for a net gain of 62 companies nationally).
The official toll as of 9/22 is slightly lower, at 395K...
Healthy Michigan Plan Enrollment Statistics
Beneficiaries with Healthy Michigan Plan Coverage: 395,547
(Includes beneficiaries enrolled in health plans and beneficiaries not required to enroll in a health plan.)
*Statistics as of September 22, 2014
...but there's an even more recent figure given today, as GOP Governor Rick Snyder tries to take credit for the program (note that the article doesn't mention "Obamacare" or "the Affordable Care Act" anywhere in it):
LANSING, Mich. (AP) — Just over 400,000 low-income adults in Michigan have signed up for Healthy Michigan, the state’s Medicaid expansion program.
In addition, the original estimate of the maximum eligible number of MI residents was apparently a bit high (500K); evidently the actual number is slightly lower...meaning that the percentage reached is even better by comparison:
...The state expects enrollment to eventually reach 477,000.
A couple of weeks ago, I reported that Maryland, which was one of the states which had embarrassingly bad technical problems with their ACA exchange--and which ended up scrapping their platform completely and moving to an all-new system based on Connecticut's excellent platform--was making some very wise decisions for 2015 based on lessons hard-learned from 2014:
BALTIMORE (Tuesday, Sept. 16, 2014) — The second year of Maryland’s health insurance marketplace for individuals and families begins on Nov. 9 when consumers will have access to a newly redesigned website that enables “anonymous browsing,” the ability to compare plans — without registering personal information — before enrolling. This feature is being launched earlier than originally planned to enhance the shopping experience for Marylanders.
One of the bigger concerns about the ACA was that the reduction in uninsured rates wouldn't be felt among the Hispanic community in particular. Instead, that demographic appears to be outpacing the general populace:
The federal healthcare law has dramatically increased coverage among Latinos, according to a new report that provides a comprehensive look at the effects of the Affordable Care Act on a historically underinsured community.
Overall, the percentage of Latinos ages 19 to 64 lacking health coverage fell from 36% to 23% between summer 2013 and spring 2014.
That's a reduction of 13 percent points, or 36% among non-elderly adults.
By comparison, the overall reduction nationally has been from around 20% down to 15%...or roughly a 25% drop.
The Obama administration is projecting that hospitals will face $5.7 billion less in uncompensated care costs than they otherwise would have in the first full year of the Affordable Care Act's coverage expansion.
Millions more people with health insurance means fewer uninsured patients are coming through hospitals' doors. That means fewer costs from bad debt or charity care from people unable to pay their bills, which amounted to about $50 billion for the nation's hospitals in 2012.
OK, so obviously the hospitals are thrilled about this, but what about the rest of us? Well, in theory, those savings should be in turn passed along in the form of lower premiums/co-pays/etc. (or at least a slower rate of increase, anyway):
Thanks to contributor Bob H. for bringing my attention to a new ACA budget study which claims that the Healthcare.Gov federal exchange has cost more than $2 billion to date, and that the total cost of the ACA since 2010 has reached $73 billion:
The total price tag for ObamaCare's main enrollment portal now stands at more than $2 billion, according to a new analysis by Bloomberg Government.
The new total, released Wednesday, includes efforts to construct and then fix HealthCare.gov after serious technical problems threatened to shutter the site last fall.
In all, implementation of the Affordable Care Act has cost more than $73 billion since its enactment in 2010, the analysis found.
I'm not going to get into the "$73 billion" part, since that includes a lot of questionable budget items such as around $14.5 billion of it being exchange premium subsidies (that is, I'm not saying those amounts are wrong, but it's highly questionable whether they should be counted as the "cost" of the law itself). This point is made in the same article by CMS itself:
OK, kind of a snarky headline I realize. This is actually a very good article by the Washington Post's Jason Millman, which goes beyond the actual number of people newly added to the Medicaid rolls since January thanks to the Affordable Care Act (by my count it's up to around either 6.5 million or 9.7 million, depending on whether you include "woodworkers" or not), but the quality of that coverage.
The good news is that, unsurprisingly, people are pretty relieved to finally have decent healthcare coverage, in many cases for the first time in their lives:
Pop Quiz: You're writing (or editing) a news story about a GAO report regarding the security situation at Healthcare.Gov. Which of these passages from the article do you choose for your big, bold-faced headline?
OK, this one doesn't fall so much into the "another ACA attack debunked!" category as the "vastly overblown" category:
Narrow networks were a popular health insurance option on the exchanges in the first enrollment period, with half of all plans for individuals offering limited groups of lower-cost providers, and new research shows consumers generally aren't griping about the products.
...Health insurers have said the healthcare reform law is spurring them to offer more narrow networks, which they say save them money and lead to lower monthly premiums in exchange for a smaller number of in-network hospitals and physicians.
After speaking with several state officials and insurers that offer exchange plans, researchers found that few consumer complaints have emerged to date about the networks' offerings.
“Insurance companies calculated that consumers would be willing to trade greater provider access for lower premiums, and to a large extent, our research confirms that,” said Sabrina Corlette, the report's lead author, in a statement.
