Health Insurance Enrollment Strongest in Federal Marketplace
By ROBERT PEAR
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Tuesday reported a big increase in new customers signing up for health insurance in Florida, Texas and other states using the federal insurance marketplace.
But in states running their own insurance exchanges, the numbers were more modest.
All told, the administration said, in the first month of open enrollment for 2015 coverage, more than four million people signed up for the first time or re-enrolled through the federal and state insurance marketplaces. About 3.4 million of them were in the 37 states using HealthCare.gov, the website of the federal marketplace.
More than two million consumers signed up for the first time, the administration reported, and 1.8 million of them did so through the federal marketplace. States with large numbers of new customers in the federal exchange included Florida (330,000), Texas (205,000), North Carolina (110,000), Georgia (103,000) and Pennsylvania (95,000).
The report showed the importance of subsidies to people seeking coverage under the Affordable Care Act.
Officials said that 87 percent of those selecting health plans for next year in the federal exchange had qualified for subsidies that would reduce their premiums. That is larger than the proportion of people who qualified for financial assistance in the initial months of the first open enrollment period (80 percent from October to December 2013). But it is about the same as the proportion who eventually qualified for subsidies in the federal exchange: 86 percent through March 2014.
The subsidies are under attack in a Supreme Court case filed by critics of the health care law, who contend that it does not authorize such assistance in states using the federal exchange.
New Enrollment Numbers Show Importance of Coming Supreme Court Case
Margot Sanger-Katz
A new report from the Obama administration highlights the very high stakes for a challenge to the Affordable Care Act before the Supreme Court. The subsidies that the court may eradicate are helping a large majority of HealthCare.gov customers pay for their health insurance.
The report is the first time that the Department of Health and Human Services has delivered some numbers on exactly who is signing up for health insurance for 2015, since the open enrollment period began in mid-November.
The data that was used isn’t perfect or complete — and many commentators rightly grumbled about its shortcomings — but the report is still a helpful snapshot of whom the new insurance markets are serving. It’s particularly detailed in looking at the people using the marketplaces in the 37 states that are letting the federal government manage their enrollment.
Over all, it found, customers who were using HealthCare.gov to pick insurance plans — some new customers, and some renewing customers — were overwhelmingly likely to qualify for federal subsidies to help them pay their premiums. On average, the report found that 87 percent of these customers were eligible for subsidies, with higher percentages in some states — up to a high of 95 percent in Mississippi.
Those numbers don’t include everyone in the marketplace; people who were enrolled in plans this year and simply automatically renewed them weren’t counted. But it’s reasonable to think that the proportion is representative. Last year’s number at the end of open enrollment was an average of 85 percent. A different report, also published Tuesday, said that a total of 6.5 million people in those states had selected plans or been automatically renewed into plans as of last week.
The plaintiffs in the Supreme Court case, called King v. Burwell, argue that the law does not allow the subsidies to help insurance customers in the states letting the federal government run individual insurance marketplaces. And if the court agrees, all those people would lose their subsidies, and many would be priced out of the market.
We’ve written before about the disruptions such a rulingwould cause. But as more people sign up for health insurance — and more of them are relying on federal subsidies — the potential impact of the decision grows.
So far, outside of official briefs, administration officials have been quiet about any concerns about the case. Asked several times last week in a news conference about possible contingency planning, the H.H.S. secretary, Sylvia Mathews Burwell, insisted that her department was confident that the government would win in court and that it was focusing its efforts on signing up new insurance customers. But a department news releaseTuesday highlighted the high rate of subsidy, suggesting that federal officials were aware of the case’s possible reach.
The substance and politics of Obamacare, in one citizen
by Paul Waldman
There’s a journalistic trope that has become so common over the past couple of decades that you probably don’t notice it anymore, or just assume that it’s how news stories have always been written. It’s what media scholars call the “exemplar” — an individual person whose story is used as a vehicle to explain the effects of a policy or an event. There’s always a danger that this narrative technique can oversimplify things. On the other hand, the use of an exemplar is a good way to connect large issues to the lives of the people affected by them.
And every once in a while, a good reporter can find an exemplar whose story so perfectly captures an issue that it does more than just spice up an article, but actually leads us to a deeper understanding.
So it is with this story in today’s New York Times by Abby Goodnough, who reports on the successes and hurdles of the Affordable Care Act in Kentucky, which accepted the expansion of Medicaid and set up its own exchange. Here’s the beginning of the story of one of the exemplars Goodnough found, which tells us a tremendous amount about where the ACA has come, substantively and politically, and what its future holds:
Amanda Mayhew is one of the beneficiaries. She earns little enough to qualify for Medicaid under the new guidelines, and she enrolled in August. She has been to the dentist five times to begin salvaging her neglected teeth, has had a dermatologist remove a mole and has gotten medication for her depression, all free.“I am very, very thankful that Medicaid does cover what I need done right now,” said Ms. Mayhew, 38. “They ended up having to pull three teeth in the last three weeks, and I would have been in a lot of pain without it.”
Then a bit later in the article, we learn more:
Maine Legislature will consider bill that takes aim at parents who opt out of vaccinations
Scientists and doctors say the best way to keep your child safe from a host of preventable illnesses is through vaccinations. Yet many parents still hesitate to get them. Now a state lawmaker wants to make it more difficult for parents to opt-out of immunizations for their children.
About 5 percent of Maine children are not immunized, one of the highest rates in the nation. Under a new bill, parents could still opt-out but only after first consulting with a primary care physician.
The bill’s sponsor is state Rep. Dick Farnsworth, D-Portland. He said the bill aims at helping parents make an informed decision on an important public health issue.
“And that’s the whole point of what we’re trying to do is to give them the opportunity to get the information so they can make an appropriate decision on their own. We’re not saying they can’t sign off on philosophical reasons,” Farnsworth said. “It’s just that we want to make sure that people have the appropriate information in order to do that intelligently.”
Right now parents can opt-out of immunizations simply by signing a waiver. The immunization plan is one of hundreds of bills the new Legislature will take up next week.
In Maine, health care changes in store as new laws take effect
New state and federal policies that take effect Thursday include two that require Maine insurance companies to pay for more cancer and autism treatments, and another that imposes the Affordable Care Act’s “employer mandate” on larger businesses that do not offer adequate health coverage.
In other states, new laws taking effect with the beginning of the year range from a rise in the hourly minimum wage in 20 states, to one that will be enforced in February in New York, where it will become illegal to take “selfies” with a lion, tiger or other big cat. The measure was passed after self-portraits with the animals started becoming more popular online, particularly with young men on dating sites.
In California, college students will have to engage in a “yes means yes” standard before they have sex, meaning that silence or a lack of resistance can no longer be deemed consent.
And in Massachusetts, a new law allows direct wine shipments from wineries outside the state to Massachusetts residents.
In Maine, however, most newly passed state laws take effect immediately upon receiving the governor’s approval or 90 days after the Maine Legislature adjourns, so only a handful of laws are slated to kick in on Jan. 1. Those that take effect Thursday run the gamut from putting lobbying restrictions on recent members of the governor’s staff to allowing more youths visiting Maine to fish for free in the state.
Arguably the highest-profile policy changes come not from Maine lawmakers but from Congress and are at the heart of the Affordable Care Act, the health law commonly referred to as Obamacare. Beginning Jan. 1, all companies with 100 or more full-time employees must offer an “affordable” health plan to at least 70 percent of their workers or face fines of up to $2,000 per employee under the so-called “employer mandate.”
Also, individuals who did not purchase health insurance for themselves for 2014 – and who do not qualify for a long list of exemptions – will be required to pay the “individual mandate” penalty for the first time when they file their 2014 income taxes. The penalty for failing to purchase insurance in 2014 is the greater of 1 percent of the person’s annual household income or $95.
http://www.pressherald.com/2015/01/01/in-maine-health-care-changes-in-store-as-new-laws-take-effect/
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