Yep, sure enough, Humana is following UnitedHealthcare out the door of multiple states next year. That's 1,800 people impacted, although they're all OFF-exchange only:
OK, the bad news is that the requested 2016 individual market rate increases in Kansas were somewhere around 28%, with some as high as 38%. This would have looked something like this:
Ouch. The good news (well...relatively good, anyway), is that in the end, the approved rate hikes are considerably less...although still not pretty:
Premiums for Kansas health insurance plans offered in the federal marketplace won’t increase as much as originally proposed, state Insurance Commissioner Ken Selzer said Tuesday.
Kansas Insurance Commissioner Ken Selzer said Tuesday that premiums for health insurance plans offered in the federal marketplace won’t increase as much as originally proposed.
Hmmm...the headline looks bad, but when you read further it's clearly a matter of perspective more than anything else:
Maryland's health insurance exchange improperly billed the federal government $28.4 million, a Department of Health and Human Services audit reported Friday.
An inspector general's probe found a lack of oversight and internal controls, not criminal wrongdoing, was the cause of the exchange's problems since the marketplace opened in 2013.
I have a ton of ACA-related stories cluttering up my in-box again; here's some of the more interesting ones, all regarding ACA Medicaid Expansion:
MICHIGAN:
For months now, I've been a bit obsessed with figuring out how my home state's Medicaid expansion enrollment has managed to reach as high as 21% more people than were supposedly even eligible for the program. Estimates last year ranged from 477,000 - 500,000, yet enrollment in Healthy Michigan (Gov. Snyder's name for Obamacare Medicaid Expansion) currently sits at a whopping 579K, less than 1 year into the program.
How Brownback Is Relying On O-Care To Close Kansas' Huge Budget Hole
Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback (R) is calling all hands on deck to fix his state's huge self-imposed budget crisis, which nearly cost him re-election this year, and the staunch conservative is now receiving an assist from an unlikely source: Obamacare.
The state's well-documented budget troubles came after Brownback's dramatic reductions in taxes since taking office in 2011. With its revenue drying up and cash reserves depleted, Kansas is staring at a $280 million hole in its $6.4 billion FY 2015 budget, which ends in June.
Brownback offered his proposal for closing that hole last week, a mixture of spending cuts and transferring funds from other parts of the budget to fill it. And second biggest of those transfers is $55 million in revenue from a Medicaid drug rebate program that was bolstered under the Affordable Care Act.
The short version then is this: Obamacare is helping Kansas address its fiscal crisis -- even if Brownback's administration seems loath to admit it.
I'm kicking myself for not writing up a full post on this issue, since it's the issue which most directly connects today's election to ACASignups-specific issues, but thankfully, Sam Stein and Jeffrey Young have done a fantastic job anyway. The key takeaway is this:
There are two threads of conventional wisdom heading into Tuesday's midterm election. The first is that the election doesn't much matter. Regardless which party controls the Senate, President Barack Obama will still occupy the White House, which means gridlock will remain, if not escalate. The second is that, when it comes to Obamacare, the status quo will remain in place for at least the next two years. Senate Republicans may push for repeal votes. But Obama will veto them. Smaller reforms may pass. But the law will mostly remain intact.
Kansas: Shocker: Pat Roberts lying about number of policies cancelled
In Kansas, yes, insurance companies were allowed to bump out non-compliant plans by at least a year...and indeed, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Kansas ended up not cancelling "between 9,500 - 10,000" of their policy holders after all.
So...that basically wipes out half of the "20K cancelled" claim already.
...Supposedly Aetna/Coventry and some smaller providers may have originally been planning on cancelling a bunch of plans as well...except that according to this article, Coventry never got around to doing so in the first place...
...That pretty much leaves BCBS KC and the other 10K. Based on the evidence at hand, my guess is that they likely reversed their cancellation decision as well...and if they did, that means that the actual number of Kansans who lost their healthcare policy in 2013 due to ACA noncompliance may have actually been as little as...ZERO.
Republican U.S. Senator Pat Roberts is scrambling for his political life after the Kansas Democratic Party pulled off a clever maneuver by deliberately dropping out of the race in order to shore up support for independent challenger Greg Orman (who may or may not caucus with the Dems, but would still be a huge step up from Roberts).
Anyway, Roberts has gone on the attack against Orman with a rather lame attack ad trying to paint Orman as an Obama/Pelosi/Ultra-Leftie Liberal, bla bla bla.
Aside from general Obamacare bashing, the ad makes one interesting claim: That "20,000 Kansans lost their healthcare because of" the ACA. The headline accompanying the narration reads "Obamacare cancels almost 20,000 Kansas health care plans" and cites "Kansas Watchdog" from 10/31/13 as the source:
Yesterday, the Big News on the ACA front was a new state-by-state survey from Gallup which showed the overall impact to date on total uninsured rates across the country.
Not surprisingly, the main takeaway, as noted by Jeffrey Young over at the Huffington Post, is that states which have embraced the law (Medicaid expansion, their own exchanges) have done a much better job overall of reducing their uninsured numbers than those which shunned it.
It's an interesting survey and an interesting piece, complete with a color-coded map which shows how the different states have fared (although I really wish they'd used higher-contrast colors; it's hard for me to distinguish some of the ranges from others).
However, there's one state which really stands out to me, and it's smack in the center: Kansas.
So, the absurd GOP House Energy & Commerce Committee Report which claimed that only 67% of exchange QHP enrollees are paid up has been thoroughly demolished by not just myself, but pretty much every other legitimate news media outlet there is (which leaves out FOX News, I'm afraid). In addition to only running through 4/15 (when 38% of the total QHP payments weren't even due yet), it only counted 160 of the 300+ insurance providers on the ACA exchanges, among many other ludicrous methodological flaws.
However, something did just occur to me. Take another look at their state-by-state breakout (which, again, only includes states on the Federal exchange...and even then, leaves out Idaho and New Mexico for reasons unknown), and there's several states which I find rather interesting:
Not surprisingly, the main takeaway, as noted by 
