There's been a recent batch of insurance rate change requests reported across various states which has gotten a lot of press. However, as I noted a couple of weeks ago, there can be a big difference between what the insurance companies ask for and what the state insurance commissioner approves. This is one of the most important (and least-written about) aspects of the ACA: Insurance companies can no longer just jack up their prices however much they feel like; those rates have to be approved by the insurance commissioner for the state they're operating in if they want to sell their wares on the exchange.
Yesterday I posted an article in which I attempted to coin the term "Halbig Conspiracy!!®" (complete with not one, but two exclamation points). However, others including Kevin Drum of Mother Jones and Brian Beutler of the New Republic prefer the term "Halbig Truthers®", which I have to admit rolls off the tongue better, so I'll go with that instead.
...can point out a conservative who so much as suspected that subsidies were limited to state exchanges prior to March 2010. Surely that's incentive enough? Let's start digging up evidence, people.
This led to a brief Twitter exchange in which Vox's Adrianna McIntyre offered to match Drum's $10, and I upped the ante (um...sort of) by offering up my collection of mint-condition official Todd McFarlane "Spawn" promotional action figures to sweeten the pot (I was a movie theater manager in a prior life and these were left over after the live action movie bombed in 1997).
Thanks to Paul Mullen for this find: A rare update out of North Dakota. Lots of useful data, but kind of frustrating because of the apples/oranges comparisons:
As of July 6, 9,953 North Dakota residents were covered by private insurance plans obtained through the federal marketplace, up from 8,374 reported at the committee’s last meeting May 14, according to Insurance Department figures.
That’s still lower than the 10,597 enrollment figure cited by the Obama administration in April, in part because the state counts only those who have actually paid their first month’s premium. Either way, enrollment fell short of the administration’s projection that 11,000 North Dakotans would enroll in private plans through the marketplace during its first six months.
Greg Sargent over at the Washington Post has done an excellent job of looking at the reality behind what I'm terming the "Halbig Conspiracy!!®" (note: if you choose to re-post this, I ask you to include both exclamation marks), by looking at the actual history of the federal exchange in the earlier drafts of the ACA bill:
...But documents from the Senate committees that worked on versions of the bill in 2009 — combined with a close look at the history of the phrase itself, and interviews with staffers directly involved in the drafting of the statutes — strongly undercut the argument that the law did not intend or provide subsidies to those on the federal exchange.
...1) The first Senate version of the health law to be passed in 2009 — by the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee — explicitly stated that subsides would go to people on the federally-established exchange. A committee memo describing the bill circulated at the time spelled this out with total clarity.
No, I don't plan on posting Minnesota updates every day, but I'm still amazed that they seem to be having no problems doing so with their (supposedly) "faulty" exchange website, while the HHS Dept (as well as the New York exchange) has made an official policy decision not to post any updates for (presumably) the full 7 month off-season period.
For a state which didn't even implement their Medicaid expansion program until April, Michigan continues to impress...
Healthy Michigan Plan Enrollment Statistics
Beneficiaries with Healthy Michigan Plan Coverage: 341,634
(Includes beneficiaries enrolled in health plans and beneficiaries not required to enroll in a health plan.)
*Statistics as of July 29, 2014
*Updated every Monday at 3 p.m.
Oregon continues to post impressive enrollment numbers considering their never-working website. Total QHPs are up another 922, Net QHPs are up 185 and Medicaid enrollments are up 12,517 over the past week:
July 28, 2014
Update: Private coverage and Oregon Health Plan enrollment through Cover Oregon
Medical enrollments through Cover Oregon: 336,146 Total private medical insurance enrollments through Cover Oregon: 96,037
Oregon Health Plan enrollments through Cover Oregon: 240,109
Dental enrollments
Total private dental insurance enrollments through CoverOregon 1: 18,794
Net enrollments Net private medical: 82,368
Net private dental: 15,218
An odd update from the DC exchange...not the update itself, which shows a modest-but-steady increase in QHP enrollment, but the fact that it only runs through July 9th even though it wasn't posted until yesterday (7/28). The prior update ran through July 1st, so that's a net gain of 197 people in 8 days, or about 24 per day. This is actually up slightly from the May/June average of 22/day.
Both the SHOP and Medicaid numbers also went up slightly as well, but again, this only covers an 8 day period:
Monday, July 28, 2014
Enrollment
From October 1, 2013 to July 9, 2014, 51,059 people have enrolled through DC Health Link in private health plans or Medicaid:
12,530 people enrolled in private health plans through the DC Health Link individual and family marketplace.
13,779 people enrolled through the DC Health Link small business marketplace.
24,720 people were determined eligible for Medicaid coverage through DC Health Link.
...After taking political heat for the exchange's technological failure, the appointees of Gov. John Kitzhaber are taking on a more significant role, transforming the agency for the future. At a time when critics of the agency say it should go away, it's the bureaucratic equivalent of an existential moment for an agency considered crucial to federal health reforms.
... The state's planned 2015 partnership with the federal exchange is called a "supported state-based" exchange. But it's supposed to be a temporary fix before setting up a full-fledged state-based exchange. It allows Oregon to keep insurer fees of about 2.5 percent of premiums for itself until the state resurrects its own website.
In any event, while there is indeed a small slowdown which seems to have kicked in since the COBRA extensions dropped out at the end of June, it's now looking more and more as though the huge drop I saw the first week of July was mainly a combination of a data entry error in Hawaii and the long 4th of July weekend in general.
