It's a whopping 64 pages long. Some of it is stuff like "how many people speaking Cambodian called the support lines?" (answer: 6) and the like, but there's also a whole bunch of handy data regarding actual healthcare policy/program enrollment in the Empire State. I don't mean to be ungrateful, as this is extremely comprehensive...but it would've been far more useful if the report had included data from the end of March (or even later), as opposed to cutting off at the end of the 2016 Open Enrollment period (January 31st). Due to attrition due to people who never pay their first premium, are denied policies for legal reasons (residency status, etc) and so on, only around 82% of the 272,000 people who selected QHPs in NY during OE3 were still actually enrolled as of two months later. A good 10-12% or so never paid in the first place and another 6-8% were kicked off involuntarily for one reason or another...none of which is reflected in this report.
Of course, as I (and others on both sides of the political spectrum) have written about many, many times, not everyone who selects a QHP (either on or off the exchanges) actually pays their first premium, and therefore is never actually enrolled in an active, effectuated policy. This amounted to roughly 12-13% of all QHP selections in 2014, but got a bit better over the next two years as people got used to how the system works and technical improvements were made. In addition, another chunk of QHP selections were scrapped by the HHS Dept. or state exchanges at later points thorughout 2014 for a variety of reasons ranging from legal residency issues to other data matching problems. Again, this percentage has been gradually whittled down as improvements to the system have been made.
With all the concern about the ACA exchange risk pool being sicker than expected as well as plenty of grumbling about how the ACA's Risk Adjustment program is working out in practice, earlier today Kevin Counihan, the CEO of the Health Insurance Marketplace (i.e., the guy in charge of HealthCare.Gov) posted a blog entry laying out some changes that CMS has in mind for the RA program going forward. It's interesting stuff for health insurance wonks, but to be honest, I was more interested in a different document also released today (referenced in the RA blog):
Changes in ACA Individual Market Costs from 2014-2015: Near-Zero Growth Suggests an Improving Risk Pool
(as whoever posted the commercial to YouTube noted, "Seriously, who struts down the sidewalk munching on a jar of peanut butter?")
I've written quite a few times before about how the small group insurance market is sort of the odd man out when it comes to the Affordable Care Act. The SHOP exchanges have turned out to be mostly a dud (to the point that the HHS Dept. has only stated once just how many people are even enrolled in SHOP policies (and even that was missing some states; my best guesstimate is arouns 150,000 nationally).
That's a net increase of 12,277 people in just 9 days, or over 1,300 per day.
There are an estimated 375,000 Louisianans eligible for ACA Medicaid expansion. If they can enroll another 700/day, they'll have maxed out by New Year's Eve.
What are the actual old and new dollar amounts that we’re talking about here?
Remember, until now we’ve been talking purely about percentages … but that can be very misleading. In our hypothetical example, Acme is a new player on the market. They priced aggressively last year in order to steal customers away from the more familiar brand names, and managed to get 5 percent of the market; not bad.
Unfortunately, those customers turned out to be loss leaders – it’s costing them more to care for their enrollees than they’re being paid, so they jacked up their rates 25 percent this year, while Blue Cross is only raising theirs 6 percent (weighted).
HOWEVER, when you look at the average premium dollar amounts of each company, look what happens:
MIT health economist Jonathan Gruber was the Republican Party's favorite stock villian during the absurd King v. Burwell (formerly Halbig v. Burwell) Supreme Court saga which raged throughout the first half of 2015, in large part because of his tendency to have a bad case of diarrhea of the mouth when speculating about the reason why certain sections of the ACA were written the way they were.
From a pure, cold economic perspective, the debate going on between the dueling studies above is about how much the first is being cancelled out by the second.
The debate which should be going on from a human perspective is about whether more or fewer people are better or worse off health-wise and economically thanks to/due to the ACA than they would otherwise be without it.
Unfortunately, when it comes to healthcare, this is a nearly impossible task to measure properly.
For instance, let's take someone with cancer. Under the ACA, they're allowed to enroll in a policy which will cover their treatments. If they have a low income, they'll receive heavy APTC assistance and possibly CSR assistance.
Without the ACA, they'd be utterly screwed and would very likely go bankrupt trying to pay the full price for treatment, or die without it, or the first followed by the second.
In an effort to prevent more insurers from abandoning the Obamacare exchange in Tennessee, the state's insurance regulator is allowing health insurers refile 2017 rate requests by Aug. 12 after Cigna and Humana said their previously requested premium hikes were too low.
As of last week, five companies in Arizona had announced plans to pull out or pull back: Health Choice, United Healthcare, Humana, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona and Health Net.
