The California ACA exchange, CoveredCA, released their 2016 budget today, and the outlook is...well, kind of underwhelming, frankly:
After using most of $1 billion in federal start-up money, California's Obamacare exchange is preparing to go on a diet.
That financial reality is reflected in Covered California's proposed budget, released Wednesday, as well as a reduced forecast calling for 2016 enrollment of fewer than 1.5 million people.
The recalibration comes after tepid enrollment growth for California during the second year of the Affordable Care Act. The state ended open enrollment in February with 1.4 million people signed up, far short of its goal of 1.7 million.
A number of factors contributed to the shortfall, but health policy experts said that some uninsured folks still find health insurance unaffordable despite the health law's premium subsidies.
MORE THAN 33,000 CONSUMERS UNAWARE OF TAX PENALTY FOR BEING UNINSURED HAVE ENROLLED IN HEALTH INSURANCE THROUGH COVERED CALIFORNIA SINCE FEBRUARY
Those Without Health Insurance Have Three Days to Enroll in Covered California to Minimize Penalty for Being Uninsured in 2015
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — With just two days until the April 30 deadline, Covered California urged consumers on Tuesday to enroll in health coverage and announced that more than 33,000 people who signed up since February indicated they were unaware of the tax penalty for being uninsured. The 33,000 enrollees were among more than 91,000 consumers who enrolled in coverage through special enrollment since open enrollment ended in February.
California's insurance commissioner criticized healthcare giant Anthem Blue Cross for imposing an "excessive" rate increase on nearly 170,000 customers statewide.
Dave Jones said Wednesday that Anthem had failed to justify its 9% average rate hike that took effect April 1. Premiums are going up as much as 25% for about 4,000 policyholders.
"These rate hikes have real financial impact on Californians," Jones said. "It means less money for other essentials like food, clothing, housing and education."
But state officials have no power to stop health insurance rate increases that are deemed unreasonable.
Jones lost his bid to change that last fall when Californians rejected the Proposition 45 rate-regulation measure by a wide margin.
SAN MATEO, California— A landmark bill to extend subsidized health care to some 1.25 million undocumented immigrants in California — more than one third of whom are Asians and Pacific Islanders, passed the California Senate’s Health Committee on April 15.
Senate Bill 4, also known as the 2015 Health for All Act, sponsored by Sen. Ricardo Lara (Dem-Bell Gardens) passed 7-0, according to reports by the Orange County Register.
Capital Public Radio’s KXJZ News said the bill was supported unanimously by the committee’s Democratic members, Republican members of the same committee, however, abstained from the vote.
A huge thank you to Hannah Recht for the link to last week's Covered California board meeting dashboard report, which contains this crucial slide:
This is incredibly useful! Not only have they given an updated #ACATaxTime tally (22,659 as of 4/12, up from 18,000 as of 4/05), but they've also given the other off-season QHP enrollments for California since Open Enrollment ended. As a bonus, they've even broken out those other QHPs by the specific reason, which is a first for any exchange report, I believe!
A few months later, I again laid into her for a rather lame "Obamacare Raised My Rates 36x!!" tweet that she sent out which, while not actually proven false, certainly didn't include any supporting evidence, details or context whatsoever.
Tax Experts Team Up with Covered California To Urge the Uninsured To Get Health Care Coverage
More Than 18,000 Californians Have Taken Advantage of Limited Special-Enrollment Opportunity; Consumers Are Encouraged to Sign Up by April 30
...“The Affordable Care Act is clear: All who can afford health insurance must buy it, and the good news is that it is more affordable than ever before,” said Covered California Executive Director Peter V. Lee. “It’s important for Californians without health coverage to sign up now to avoid the increasing tax penalty they will face in 2015 if they remain uninsured.”
Lee said that more than 18,000 consumers have taken advantage of the special-enrollment opportunity since it began Feb. 23.
Now that the King v. Burwell Supreme Court oral arguments are out of the way (with radio silence expected until they announce the decision sometime in June) , the next Big Development to keep an eye on ACA-wise is...Tax Season! There will be plenty of stories about how many people have to pay back some/all of their 2014 tax credits, how many will receive additional tax credits...and, most germane to this site, how many additional people enroll via the exchanges to avoid having to pay (most) of the higher tax penalty next year for not being covered in 2015 during the Tax Filing Season Special Enrollment Period (SEP), or #ACATaxTime as I prefer to call it.
A couple of weeks back, CoveredCA reported that they had renewed 944,000 2014 QHP enrollees, and added another 474,000 new enrollees for 2015, for a grand total of around 1,418,000 private policy enrollees (payments pending, of course). Like every other state, CA tacked on an "overtime" period for people who were waiting "in line" by the 2/15 deadline but hadn't completed the process. I was assuming this might push their grand total up to perhaps 1.5 million or so.
Today, CoveredCA released their final official numbers, and they're...underwhelming:
Obamacare: @CoveredCA says newly enrolled 2015 was 495K, total enrollment including renewals is 1.41M #ACA
Long-time followers of this site know that I attempt to track every person who gets enrolled in healthcare coverage through the Affordable Care Act, whether it's via individual/family exchanges, Medicaid expansion, off-exchange QHP enrollments...or the SHOP (Small Business) exchanges. They'll also recall that last year, due to the massive technical problems which most of the exchange websites faced, only a handful of SHOP exchanges were even usable, much less actually signing people up. The exchanges were, for the most part, so busy scrambling to get the individual enrollment side working properly that they pretty much put the SHOP exchanges on the back burner. Only about a half-dozen states had theirs running at all, and the total enrollment topped out at only around 83,000 people nationally.
