NOTE: This was originally posted over at Daily Kos. I've since ported it over here for archival purposes.
Hey, GOP: EAT ME!!
Yeah, that's right: I wandered through the Healthcare.Gov desert for 40 days (well, 48 to be precise) and came out the other side with a small, but not insignificant subsidy for my family and I. $62/month or $744/year. Not huge, but that's enough to cover, say, our cable bill, anyway.
More importantly, this is based on our projected income next year. If we end up falling short, our actual subsidy could be significantly higher (or lower, if we do better than expected, although that would be a good problem to have, of course).
I haven't actually enrolled in a plan yet, although I did a bit of window shopping just to make sure that the site would actually let me do so. My wife and I will do so together later this week, under calmer, more organized circumstances. We do have 22 Silver or Gold plans to choose from, and while our actual premiums look to be fairly close to what we're paying now, the coverage should be better.
Meanwhile, since the official HHS report last week, I've made some major changes to the ObamacareSignups.netspreadsheet:
The reason I was including both applications as well as actual enrollments is because most of the reports didn't bother to distinguish between the two. Plus, the actual number of completed applications do serve a legitimate purpose as well (for instance, we know that as of 11/02 there were an additional 900,000 applications in the hopper, ready for plan selection).
However, with the release of the official enrollment numbers for the first 33 days (10/1 - 11/2), it seems a bit pointless to continue with the applications as well. Therefore, I'm making a major change to the spreadsheet.
As everyone knows by now, the official enrollment figure--as of November 2nd--was about 106,000 (plus another 392,000 added to Medicaid).
Well, there's something important to remember--things have started to ramp up since the crappy first month. The HC.gov site may still be having problems, but most of the state exchanges have worked theirs out, and California is starting to get things in gear:
More than 59,000 Californians have signed up for coverage since the state launched its health insurance marketplace last month, but the figures showed a significant uptick in activity in the first two weeks of November, officials said Wednesday.
The Obama administration will on Wednesday release data on October enrollments through the federal health insurance exchange.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will release a report on the numbers at 3:30 p.m., and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius will discuss the findings on a press call then. The numbers are for people living in states using the federal exchange and not state exchanges, which have slowly been releasing their data.
The White House has been trying to lower already low expectations for the numbers, as press secretary Jay Carney did, yet again, at his daily briefing Wednesday. "No one will be satisfied with the numbers because they will be below what we sought" prior to the launch of the website, he told reporters.
Carney said he hadn't yet discussed the numbers with Obama.
So far, private health plans have received enrollment data for 40,000 to 50,000 users of the federal marketplace, the people familiar with the figures said.
The figure of 40,000 to 50,000 doesn't include people in the 36 states who used the federal website to learn they qualify for Medicaid, a federal-state health program for low-income people. Medicaid is being expanded in many of the 36 states.
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius today acknowledged that long-awaited enrollment figures for the rocky first month of Obamacare will be “very low.”
“We intend to give you as much information as we can validate,” Sebelius told a Senate Finance Committee hearing where lawmakers from both parties harshly criticized the rollout and her agency’s lack of foresight about the massive problems. She said the initial batch of enrollment figures being released next week cover “the first month of enrollment” and will include both Medicaid and health plan numbers in the new insurance exchanges.
It will be very interesting to see just how close--or completely dead wrong--my own figures are at ObamacareSignups.net
NOTE: This was originally posted over at Daily Kos. I've since ported it over here for archival purposes.
Thanks to the latest eyebrow-raising numbers out of California, the ObamacareSignups.nettally--including Medicaid expansion--now stands at 1,622,521 .
I should note that the big numbers from both California and New York are rather fuzzy, because they're very large but also don't give any real breakdown. The other day Rep. Capps of CA-24 claimed California has 600,000 added to Medicaid and 125,000 applications on the exchanges; today CoveredCA claims 227,000 applications...but doesn't break this out, so that could be a major issue. By the same token, NY supposedly has 200,000 completed applications...and another source claims 27,000 of these are Medicaid. I'm fairly certain that the breakdown is actually more like 140K Medicaid to 60K Exchanges, but I can't be sure for now.
If you were to remove both California and New York from the totals completely, they would both drop dramatically, to around 573,000 combined, so this is a pretty important thing to sort out.
NOTE: This was originally posted over at Daily Kos. I've since ported it over here for archival purposes.
Thanks to the latest eyebrow-raising numbers out of California, the ObamacareSignups.nettally--including Medicaid expansion--now stands at 1,519,979.
It's important to understand that sources and methodology for this sort of tracking is going to vary widely, depending on what exactly it is that you're trying to track (as well as the source, of course). In my case, yes, I'm including Medicaid expansion signups, because ultimately, what matters is people actually getting decent medical care at an affordable price.
In addition, I've chosen to include completed applications for healthcare plans, even if they haven't actually been enrolled yet. You could certainly argue that I shouldn't count it, but frankly, so many of the articles/sources I'm using fail to make that distinction either that I grew tired of trying to separate the wheat from the chaff.
One very strict (and openly anti-ACA) tracking source, EnrollMaven.com, lists the number as only about 39,000. Another, the Advisory Board Company, puts the number at 160,000, but with 404,000 applications.
NOTE: This was originally posted over at Daily Kos. I've since ported it over here for archival purposes.
As of today, the ObamacareSignups.net tally now stands at 974,539.
It's important to understand that sources and methodology for this sort of tracking is going to vary widely, depending on what exactly it is that you're trying to track (as well as the source, of course). In my case, yes, I'm including Medicaid expansion signups, because ultimately, what matters is people actually getting decent medical care at an affordable price.
In addition, I've chosen to include completed applications for healthcare plans, even if they haven't actually been enrolled yet. You could certainly argue that I shouldn't count it, but frankly, so many of the articles/sources I'm using fail to make that distinction either that I grew tired of trying to separate the wheat from the chaff.
One very strict (and openly anti-ACA) tracking source, EnrollMaven.com, lists the number as only about 36,000. Another, the Advisory Board Company, puts the number at 116,000, but with 365,000 applications.
NOTE: This was originally posted over at Daily Kos. I've since ported it over here for archival purposes.
As of today, the ObamacareSignups.net tally now stands at 941,458.
It's important to understand that sources and methodology for this sort of tracking is going to vary widely, depending on what exactly it is that you're trying to track (as well as the source, of course). In my case, yes, I'm including Medicaid expansion signups, because ultimately, what matters is people actually getting decent medical care at an affordable price.
In addition, I've chosen to include completed applications for healthcare plans, even if they haven't actually been enrolled yet. You could certainly argue that I shouldn't count it, but frankly, so many of the articles/sources I'm using fail to make that distinction either that I grew tired of trying to separate the wheat from the chaff.
As a result, you're going to see a VERY wide range of estimates--one very strict (and openly anti-ACA) tracking source, EnrollMaven.com, lists the number as only about 36,000. Another, the Advisory Board Company, puts the number at 116,000, but with 365,000 applications.
