For months I posted weekly looks at the rate of COVID-19 cases & deaths at the county level since the end of June, broken out by partisan lean (i.e, what percent of the vote Donald Trump received in 2020), as well as by the vaccination rate of each county in the U.S. (nonpartisan). This basically amounts to the point when the Delta Variant wave hit the U.S., although it had been quietly spreading under the radar for a few months prior to that.
More recently, I've switched to posting the same data starting on December 15th, which is (roughly) the start of the Omicron variant wave (although this is fuzzier than the start of the Delta wave).
RECORD-SETTING 182,000+ ENROLL IN COVERAGE THROUGH MARYLAND HEALTH CONNECTION DURING OPEN ENROLLMENT
Uninsured Marylanders can enroll through the state tax form's Easy Enrollment or, if eligible, through Medicaid
BALTIMORE – Gov. Larry Hogan today announced that a record number of Marylanders enrolled for health coverage for 2022 in the annual open enrollment that just ended through Maryland Health Connection. The 182,861 enrollments marked a new record for the state-based health insurance marketplace, a 10% increase over the 2021 open enrollment total of 166,038.
Maryland was one of four state marketplaces, along with Colorado, New York and the District of Columbia, that extended their original open enrollment deadlines in response to the hospitalization surge driven by the Omicron variant of Covid-19. Maryland’s open enrollment was originally scheduled to run from Nov. 1, 2021 to Jan. 15, 2022, but was extended through February.
In March 2020, Congress offered states additional Medicaid funding as long as they agreed to keep everyone enrolled in the program for the duration of the federal public health emergency, regardless of their eligibility status. As of January 2021, nearly 10 million had joined Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) during the pandemic, pushing enrollment to a record high of more than 80 million people. (Some independent analyses put the current total higher, closer to 90 million.)
I'm not going to mince words here: While the Omicron variant wave of the COVID pandemic appears to have mostly subsided nationally (the 7-day new case average has plummeted from an all-time high of around 800,000/day nationally in mid-January to around 55,000/day now), I think the seemingly across-the-board abandonment of mask mandates at the federal, state and local levels is still a big mistake.
I would have waited until new daily cases drop further (to perhaps 10 per 100,000 per day, or around ~33,000/day nationally) and hold at that rate or lower for a solid month before giving the "all clear" for vaccinated folks to remove their masks at most indoor settings.
For unvaccinated people, of course, I'd want them to be required to wear masks indoors in public until they actually get vaccinated (which, aside from young children, nearly all of them should have done already; it's been nearly a year since they've been widely available, for God's sake).
A new Covered California analysis describes the potential impact to consumers if the increased health insurance subsidies that were part of the American Rescue Plan are allowed to expire at the end of 2022.
In California, all consumers would face premium increases, including 1 million lower-income consumers (individuals earning less than $32,200 per year), who would see their premiums more than double.
In addition, middle-income individuals and families (for individuals, those earning more than $51,520 per year), would no longer be eligible for any financial help and would face higher monthly premium costs that for many will mean annual cost increases in the thousands of dollars.
The increase in costs could force more than 150,000 people in California and more than 1.7 million nationally to drop their health insurance.
For months I posted weekly looks at the rate of COVID-19 cases & deaths at the county level since the end of June, broken out by partisan lean (i.e, what percent of the vote Donald Trump received in 2020), as well as by the vaccination rate of each county in the U.S. (nonpartisan). This basically amounts to the point when the Delta Variant wave hit the U.S., although it had been quietly spreading under the radar for a few months prior to that.
More recently, I've switched to posting the same data starting on December 15th, which is (roughly) the start of the Omicron variant wave (although this is fuzzier than the start of the Delta wave).
NOTE: Given how much the national pace of vaccination shots has slowed down recently (the 7-day average is down to around ~330,000/day), going forward this will be a MONTHLY update, unless the pace picks up again significantly.
Methodology reminders:
I go by county residents who have received the 2nd COVID-19 shot only (or 1st in the case of the J&J vaccine).
I base my percentages on the total population via the 2020 U.S. Census as opposed to adults only or those over 11 years old (or even over 4 years old).
For most states + DC I use the daily data from the Centers for Disease Control, but there are some where the CDC is either missing county-level data entirely or where the CDC data is less than 90% complete at the county level. Therefore:
Section 673(2) of the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (OBRA) of 1981 (42 U.S.C. 9902(2)) requires the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services to update the poverty guidelines at least annually, adjusting them on the basis of the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U). The poverty guidelines are used as an eligibility criterion by Medicaid and a number of other Federal programs.
The poverty guidelines issued here are a simplified version of the poverty thresholds that the Census Bureau uses to prepare its estimates of the number of individuals and families in poverty.
As required by law, this update is accomplished by increasing the latest published Census Bureau poverty thresholds by the relevant percentage change in the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U). The guidelines in this 2022 notice reflect the 4.7 percent price increase between calendar years 2020 and 2021.
However, I deliberately left out a section because I wanted to discuss it separately. If you scroll down to pages 31 & 32, you'll see a summary of two important pieces of ACA-related legislation which have been introduced in the California state legislature.
One of these is SB 967, introduced by CA State Senator Robert Hertzberg, which would do the following:
