Remember "Florida Health Choices", the brainchild of Republican Senator Marco Rubio which was supposed to be the Florida GOP's response to the Affordable Care Act health insurance exchanges?
The Florida Republican Party flushed $900,000 in startup funds into a website/"exchange" which signed up a whopping 30 paying customers in 6 months, at a cost of $30,000 apiece...or between 46x - 81x as much per enrollee as the "wasteful" HealthCare.Gov.
Beneficiaries with Healthy Michigan Plan Coverage: 546,807
(Includes beneficiaries enrolled in health plans and beneficiaries not required to enroll in a health plan.)
*Statistics as of February 9, 2015
*Updated every Monday at 3 p.m.
Connecticut's official 2015 QHP target is an even 100K. They were 99% of the way there as of last night, with no technical problems to speak of gumming up the works:
As of Jan. 30, 95,700 people had signed up for private insurance through Access Health, including about 66,700 repeat customers from 2014. (On Monday, officials said more than 99,000 people had signed up for private insurance plans through the exchange.) By comparison, last year, slightly more than 80,000 people bought insurance through the exchange (though a few thousand dropped out as the year went on).
My own target for CT is 114K. To reach that, they'll have to enroll just 2,100/day for the final week, or less than twice the rate they've averaged so far. This shouldn't be a problem; nationally, I'm expecting QHP enrollments to average around 286K/day all this week, which is around 2.33x more than the average to date, and Connecticut has one of the most solid operations of any state.
Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) said Thursday that Republicans might not be able to pass an alternative to ObamaCare until 2017.
Burr, along with Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.) unveiled a GOP replacement plan for ObamaCare on Wednesday. But, appearing the next evening on Fox News's "Special Report with Bret Baier," Burr said no single idea is likely to generate consensus.
"I don't think so," he said. "I think that there are going to be a lot of ideas not only in Congress but around the think tanks here in Washington and around the country."
Some positive news to cushion the blow of the CoOportunity meltdown...
Y'know, there's all sorts of ways to spin formal press releases.
For instance: Moments ago, the HHS Dept. of the United States sent out this press release, touting the fact that about 6.5 million people who selected private policies via Healthcare.Gov for 2015 (about 87% of the 7.5 million total confirmed via the federal exchange) qualify to receive tax credits to help cover the cost of their health insurance premiums. The average tax credit for those 6.5 million people is $268/month, or $3,216 per year:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Monday, Feb. 09, 2015
Almost 6.5 million consumers qualify for an average tax credit of $268 per month through the Health Insurance Marketplaces
The Feb. 15 deadline is just six days away; 8 in 10 consumers can get coverage for $100 or less
Outgoing Republican Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett tried a desperate hail mary play to save his job: Expanding Medicaid via the Affordable Care Act, but doing it in an absurdly complicated and confusing way in order to appease his Republican base. It didn't work; he lost to Democrat Tom Wolf, one of the few bright spots for the Dems in an otherwise lousy 2014 election.
I'm not a lawyer, but I've always understood that in order for a case to be brought to court, there generally has to be, you know, a plaintiff. That is, as far as I know, a lawyer can't just file a suit and have it taken up by the Supreme Court of the United States just because they don't happen to approve of a law; there has to be someone who can claim that they were actually harmed by it (or at least by a particular provision of the law as enacted or enforced). Alternately, they have to at the very least have "standing" to challenge the law under the legal definition of such, no matter how thin the argument may be.
In December, Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam, a Republican, got the deal he wanted from the Obama administration: Tennessee would accept more than $1 billion in federal funding to expand Medicaid, as allowed for in the Affordable Care Act, but Obama aides would allow Haslam to essentially write staunchly conservative ideas into the program's rules for the state. He dubbed the reformed Medicaid program "Insure Tennessee."
But the state's chapter of Americans for Prosperity, the national conservative group whose foundation is chaired by controversial billionaire David Koch, argued Haslam was just trying to trick conservatives into implementing Obamacare in their state by giving it a new name. AFP campaigned aggressively Haslam's plans for the next six weeks, even running radio ads blasting GOP state legislators who said they might vote for it.
On Wednesday, Haslam's bill died in a committee of the Tennessee state senate. The vote was one of the clearest illustrations of the increasing power of AFP and other conservative groups funded in part by the Koch brothers.
Technically speaking, there could be one more "weekly snapshot" after this Wednesday's, since those reports run through the previous Friday...except that would be kind of silly, since Sunday the 15th is the final day of the open enrollment period anyway. I find it difficult to believe that HHS would issue a report next Wednesday which leaves off the final 2 days of the period (which are also likely to be the busiest yet).
Anyway, on Wednesday the 11th, HHS should issue a report including all HC.gov QHP selections as of Friday the 6th. I'm expecting the total to be roughly 7.75 million, or about 276K for the week.
National QHP selections, including all 14 state-based exchanges, should have been roughly 10.32 million as of Friday, and should have started to ramp up significantly over this weekend. In fact, I'm anticipating hitting around 10.48 million by midnight Sunday...which should mean roughly 9.2 million paid enrollees.
In other words, we've finally broken through the HHS Dept's official exchange-based private policy enrollment projection for 2015.
