California

About a year ago I wrote about a bill working it's way through the California state legislature which, if passed and signed into law, would have allowed all of California's 1.5 million uninsured, undocumented immigrants to either enroll in Medi-Cal (CA's name for Medicaid) or in ACA exchange policies via Covered California (with the state picking up the tab for the APTC/CSR financial assistance). Since the ACA specifically prohibits any federal dollars from being used, the state would be on the hook for 100% of the cost.

The bad news is that this ambitious bill didn't end up making it through the process. The good news is that a stripped-down version of it did become law:

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, California averaged around 7.8 million Medicaid/CHIP enrollees prior to the ACA; this number has since shot up about 58%, to 12.3 million people.

One of the chief arguments in favor of the ACA has always been that uninsured people tend to not get treated for ailments/injuries at all (for obvious reasons), and then end up going to the emergency room when that gangrenous foot leaves them no choice. Not only does this end up costing much more to treat, the hospital is also stuck footing the bill (no pun intended) since the uninsured also tend not to have any money to pay out of pocket either (if they did, the odds are that they'd have some form of insurance, after all).

Covered California held a press call a few minutes ago in which they released detailed enrollment numbers for the 2016 Open Enrollment Period, broken down a number of different ways, including by rate region and individual carrier market share. They even broke the individual numbers out between renewals and new enrollees.

Unfortunately, I only caught half the call, but the full press release should be coming out momentarily which is supposed to have all of the numbers broken out every which way.

Until then, here are some oddball key points from the call:

Hmmm...this was unexpected:

ALERT! If you started enrolling by 1/31 deadline but unable to finish due to recent snowstorm, you may finish by 2/5 pic.twitter.com/U9X3QhTIT9

— MD Health Connection (@MarylandConnect) January 29, 2016

I'm surprised by this for several reasons. The snowstorm was nearly a week ago, and there's still 3 days left for people to enroll as it is; are there still a lot of areas of Maryland coping with power outages/other disruptions which are making it unreasonable to expect people to get in under the wire?

Second, because CMS just stated pretty unequivocally that HealthCare.Gov will not be offering any official deadline extension (although, like the MD exchange, they did say that they'll have an "in line by midnight" exception). I assumed that if HC.gov was taking a "hard line stance" that the state exchanges would as well.

This Just In...

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Covered California announced that a surge of consumers interested in affordable, quality health care coverage had signed up through the agency this week. Through Jan. 27, more than 329,000 new enrollees had picked a health coverage plan during the current open-enrollment period. In addition, more than 148,000 new and renewing consumers had enrolled in the new optional family dental coverage.

As always, CoveredCA is happy to tout their new enrollees but has a weird thing about keeping mum on the number who renewed policies from 2015. This would make sense if the renewal number sucked, but it doesn't: The ASPE report through 12/27 clearly states that they had 1,411,664 QHP selections, of which 84% were renewals (automatic or active) by 2015 enrollees.

84% of 1,411,664 = roughly 1,186,000. Add 329K to that and you get 1.515 million QHP selections to date.

The final 2016 deadline to enroll in a qualifying healthcare plan for policies starting coverage as of March 1st officially ended as of MIDNIGHT on January 31st.

As usual however, there are a few caveats to this...but not as many as the past two years:

OK, so I've just received word that Covered California has added exactly 290,137 new QHP enrollees as of January 18th.

This compares with the 238K new enrollees as of January 2nd, so that's around 52,000 additional people from 1/03 - 1/18, or 3,466 per day.

The official ASPE report, which ran through 12/27/15 for California, had their tally at 1,411,664, of which 84% were re-enrollees from 2015, which should be around 1.186 million.

Add 290K to that and you're up to roughly 1.476 million people.

My official target for California is 1.80 million, so CoveredCA has reached 82% of where I was expecting them to be by now...which is right in line with where I think things stand nationally.

Covered California sent out an interesting press release today:

Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi visited the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), today to highlight a new report showing that thousands of Californians who have obtained health insurance as a result of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act have received vital treatment — including brain surgeries, heart transplants, cancer treatment and trauma care — since January 2014, when the health exchange opened its doors.

“Today’s report is the latest evidence that the Affordable Care Act is delivering on the promise of making health care a right for all, not just a privilege for the few,” Pelosi said. “Covered California has been an enormous success. Thanks to this historic law, nearly 1.3 million Californians now have affordable coverage through the Covered California marketplace — and this data today makes clear that Californians are using this coverage to access vital, high-quality health care.”

Every time Covered California issues a press release, it's like Lucy pulling away the football from Charlie Brown; I always think that this time they're gonna finally let me know how many current ACA exchange enrollees have re-enrolled for 2016...but it never has that number included. Considering that it could potentially be as high as 1.3 million people, that's kind of a big deal (although I realistically expect the number to be somewhere between 1.0 - 1.2 million at most).

Anyway, today is no exception: Zilch on the renewal numbers (and not even any updated new enrollment figures since the 197K they announced as of 12/15)...although they did include one interestingly-worded tidbit which is subject to quite a bit of speculation:

Covered California Highlights Major Health Insurance Changes for the New Year — New Penalties, New Requirements and, for Those With Coverage, Improved Benefits, More Options and More Access to Care

Color me impressed!

Covered California Experiences Record-Breaking Enrollment for Consumers Seeking Jan. 1 Coverage

More than 55,000 Sign Up Over Two Days As Covered California Extends Deadline for Consumers

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Covered California announced Wednesday that more than 197,000 consumers had enrolled in health care coverage by the end of Tuesday, Dec. 15, including more than 22,000 on Monday and more than 32,000 on Tuesday.

The two-day total of more than 55,000 surpassed the enrollment figures seen last year during the same two day period when more than 35,000 people signed up for coverage on Dec. 14-15, 2014.

“The interest we have seen over the last two days is further proof of the continued demand that Californians have for quality, affordable health care coverage,” said Covered California Executive Director Peter V. Lee. “We want to make sure that everyone who is working to get in the door has the time they need to get the coverage they deserve.”

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