RIGOROUS NEGOTIATIONS WITH HEALTH INSURANCE COMPANIES KEEP RATE INCREASES LOW AND CHOICES ROBUST
Strong Enrollment for 2014 Prompts Balanced Risk Pool and Competition Between Health Plans; Average Statewide Rate Increase Kept to 4.2 Percent
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — The vast majority of Covered California consumers will see low increases in their health insurance premiums for 2015, and many consumers will see no increase or even a decrease. The statewide weighted average[*] came in at 4.2 percent, with some plans offering weighted average rates that are 8.5 percent lower than current pricing.
First, remember the news from yesterday that the ACA had lopped California's uninsured rate in half, from 22% down to 11% as of June? 22% of 38 million people = about 8.36 million; half of that is 4.18 million.
Next, remember that massive backlog of 900,000 new Medicaid (aka Medi-Cal) enrollees that California was working with as of the end of May?
For months, the state has labored under the largest such pile-up in the country, with 900,000 pending cases reported in May—the combined result of unexpectedly high application numbers and bug-ridden computer systems.
A couple of weeks ago there was much ado about a new Commonwealth Fund survey which found that nationally, the uninsured rate had been cut by 25% (from 20% down to 15%). Well, buried in that study was this bit about California specifically:
The percentage of uninsured Californians has been cut in half since the federal health law began expanding coverage nine months ago, according to a new national survey.
In September of 2013, 22 percent of California adults were uninsured. By last month, that number had fallen to just 11 percent, the biggest drop among the nation’s six largest states.
Some days I forget just how friggin' HUGE the state of California is...
Part of the delays can be attributed to high demand. In California, as in many of the 26 states that opted to expand Medicaid eligibility under the Affordable Care Act, people turned out in much higher numbers than projected. The state health department said it now expects 2.2 million people to enroll in Medi-Cal by next month -- 300,000 more than estimated last fall.
Roughly 1.4 million of those applicants were newly eligible for Medi-Cal, which was expanded under the Affordable Care Act, commonly called Obamacare, to serve people who earn up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level. About 600,000 more were previously eligible for coverage but had not enrolled. Experts say the massive outreach campaigns across the country helped alert many of these people to their eligibility.
While the massive backlog issue is a serious problem, this story does give some nice solid numbers to plug into the Medicaid spreadsheet for the largest state in the country:
Since I started the ACA Signups project, I've generally restricted my posts to ACA enrollment-specific articles and data. After all, the subject of healthcare is so huge, and there's so many other far better sources for developments in the medical field, etc, that it seems best to stick to the subject at hand.
However, the anti-vaxxer movement, which started as the punchline to a bad joke named "Jenny McCarthy" has ceased to be amusing and has now become flat-out frightening.
From January 1 to June 10 this year, California already had 3,458 cases of whopping cough, which already exceeds the number of cases reported in 2013, and following a surge in the incidence of the disease in the past two weeks, health official found it necessary to declare an epidemic.
A trifecta of updates out of the LA Times today thanks to contributor Brian W; can you count how many GOP talking points take serious damage below:
New data show the number of students without health insurance on California State University campuses dropped by 60% after Obamacare enrollment, defying concerns that not enough young people would sign up for health insurance.
...During the open enrollment period that ended in April, some officials worried that if not enough young, healthy people signed up for coverage, insurance companies would be left with too many sick and expensive customers, which would eventually cause carriers to raise premiums.
According to a poll released Thursday, at the 15 largest CSU campuses, approximately 30% of students were uninsured before enrollment began, and 10% were uninsured after. The drop accounts for 60,000 students who became insured, and illustrates the late surge of young people who signed up for policies.
I spent a lot of time the past couple of days hammering on the HHS Dept. for announcing that they're discontinuing their official monthly enrollment reports. However, it also occurs to me that I haven't heard a peep out of most of the state-run exchanges in almost a month either:
First, apparently the ACA is such a "socialist, anti-capitalist" enemy of the free market that the private, for-profit insurance companies are just fleeing for the hills. Oh wait, actually...
Peter Lee, executive director of Covered California, said all 11 current health plans have indicated they plan to return next year. He also said three new plans have submitted letters of intent indicating they may compete on the exchange in 2015.
I was so caught up in the national tally implications, I forgot to actually devote a proper entry to California itself. There's some additional key numbers to look at here:
From April 1-15, 205,685 consumers – including a one-day record of more than 50,000 on the final day – completed their applications and selected health plans through the Covered California exchange, bringing the total to 1,395,929 at the end of the historic, first open enrollment period. The total exceeds the base projection for Covered California for the entire six-month enrollment period by more than 815,929.
As noted earlier, let's assume that "over 50,000" means, say, 50,100. To put this in context, they're saying there were (205,685 - 50,100) = 155,585 QHP enrollments in the first 14 days (about 11,100/day)...followed by 50,100 on the last day. That's 4.5x the rate it had been.
From April 1-15, 205,685 consumers – including a one-day record of more than 50,000 on the final day – completed their applications and selected health plans through the Covered California exchange, bringing the total to 1,395,929 at the end of the historic, first open enrollment period. The total exceeds the base projection for Covered California for the entire six-month enrollment period by more than 815,929.
Let's assume that "over 50,000" means, say, 50,100.
To put this in context, they're saying there were (205,685 - 50,100) = 155,585 QHP enrollments in the first 14 days (about 11,100/day)...followed by 50,100 on the last day. That's 4.5x the rate it had been.
Until this, I was estimating that the national 4/01 - 4/15 average would be around 45K - 55K/day nationally during the extension period, or around 675K - 825K total, for a grand total of around 7.77- 7.93 million exchange QHPs total. I settled on 7.78M as my "official" projection to be on the cautious side.
