...I'm working on my latest crudely-produced-but-hopefully-informative explainer video!
It's actually a two-parter. The first part gives an overview of how Risk Pools actually work and why quarantining sick people into a separate High Risk Pool is such a terrible idea. The second part goes into why Donald Trump's recent Short-Term/Association Plan executive order will make a problem which already existed in 2017, made worse by design in 2018, even worse starting in 2019.
Here's a sneak peak. I hope to have Part One uploaded this week and Part Two either towards the end of the week or early next week.
Time and opportunity still exist to replace Obamacare.
...I reported in January that a number of conservative groups, under the leadership of former Sen. Rick Santorum, was working hard to craft a new Obamacare replacement...Behind the scenes, those groups...have continued to meet and tweak their plan, and they seem just a few weeks away from being able to unveil it.
...I listened in on a March 21 conference call among numerous interested parties, and received further updates within the past week from Santorum.
Back in January, I noted that Wisconsin GOP Governor Scott Walker, who has followed the party line on the ACA since it was first signed into law, has suddenly found religion:
After years of fighting Obamacare, Gov. Scott Walker is now seeking to stabilize the state marketplace under the law.
Wisconsin plans to permission to cover expensive medical claims for health insurers on the marketplace, which should lower premium increases and could bring back companies that dropped out, the governor said in an interview with reporters on Friday ahead of his election-year State of the State address Wednesday.
The state will also ask to permanently continue SeniorCare, a prescription drug program Walker has previously sought to pare down, he said.
Walker also said he’ll ask the state Senate to pass a bill authored by Democratic lawmakers and passed by the Assembly that would enshrine into state law access to private insurance for people with pre-existing conditions.
In the most significant of his health care proposals, Walker will ask the Legislature to join a few other states in adopting a reinsurance programto prop up the individual market, which is used by some 216,000 residents, in a state innovation waiver allowed under the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare.
Last month I urged Democrats to go strongly on offense re. campaigning on healthcare policy in 2018 given the general landscape but especially the exit polling out of the special Congressional election in Pennsylvania:
Health care was a top issue to voters. Health care was ranked as a top issue for 52% of voters (15% saying it was the most important issue and another 37% saying it was very important). Only 19% said it was not that important or not important at all.
Conor Lamb won big especially among voters for whom health care was a top priority. Among voters who said health care was the most important issue for them, Lamb beat Rick Saccone 64-36 and among the broader group of voters who said it was either the most important or a very important issue Lamb beat Saccone 62-38.
On health care, voters said Lamb better reflected their views by 7 points (45% to 38%) over Saccone. With independents, that gap widened to 16 points with 50% saying Lamb’s health care views were more in line with theirs to only 34% for Saccone.
A week or so I noted that activists in Utah had managed to secure enough ballot petition signatures to get full, no-strings-attached ACA Medicaid expansion placed on the ballot this November...superseding legislation signed by the Governor which would otherwise only expand it to fewer than half as many people, while also imposing a work requirement on enrollees:
If approved, the initiative would require the state to expand Medicaid to people making up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level, and would prohibit enrollment caps.
Under ObamaCare, the federal government would cover 90 percent of the costs of expansion. The state share would be funded through a 0.15 percent increase in the sales tax.
...The ballot initiative would cover more than 150,000 people.
Enrollment in the federally facilitated marketplace has dropped 9 percent over the past two years, with a nearly 40 percent drop in new enrollment, while enrollment in state-based marketplaces remained steady during the same period.
Nothing new under the sun here; this is the core of what I do at ACASignups.net. In fact, this press release underplays the point slightly: The official enrollment tallies are down 10% on the federal exchange since 2016 and up 1.5%, although the discrepancy might be partly due to Kentucky shifting from state-based status to federal status in 2017.
I know I tend to pitch for folks to support my work here at ACA Signups fairly frequently, but today I want to pass the hat a bit for my friend Chris Savage of Eclectablog (and yes, there's even a healthcare angle here). From his post earlier today:
You may recall that earlier this year, I had a run-in with a bad dude named Diverticulitis that put me in the hospital for ten days. As it turns out, I need to have surgery next month to keep that scary situation from ever happening again. Because this is happening during the time when we normally hold our annual fundraising party, we are going to postpone the party until late August when I am back on my feet.
The upshot is that the Eclectablog bank account is nearly depleted and won’t be significantly refreshed until almost September. Therefore, this quarterly fundraiser is more important than most. We need to raise enough money to keep paying our fabulous contributors until the annual party.
At first it looked like CMS was planning on allowing doctors to "balance bill" Medicare patients. Balance billing is already a controversial issue with private insurance; it's the practice of a doctor/hospital charging the patient directly for the difference between what the doctor wants to be paid and what the insurance company agrees to pay them.
Former Acting CMS Administrator Andy Slavitt and Huffington Post healthcare reporter Jeff Young have each written up a fairly comprehensive list of the various types of ACA/healthcare sabotage which the Trump Administration and/or other Republicans in Congress or at the state level have attempted (or are in the process of attempting today).
As I noted last week, the Republican-controlled Michigan state Senate rammed through a draconian work requirement bill for ACA Medicaid expansion enrollees in spite of the fact that it would serve no positive purpose and would only "save money" by kicking thousands of low-income Michiganders off their healthcare coverage while actually harming the economy.
I further noted that while I was pretty sure the bill would easily pass the state Senate (where the GOP holds a supermajority) and will likely pass the GOP-controlled state House as well, there is a decent chance that it could be vetoed by GOP Gov. Rick Snyder. Snyder is guilty of a long list of sins during his time as Governor, including being indirectly responsible for the water supply for the entire city of Flint being poisoned a few years back. At the same time, oddly, once in a blue moon he'll actually do something decent and good, and the one he deserves the most praise for on this front is pushing to get Medicaid expansion through in the first place.
WAIT, I MISSED THIS: The Trump Administration DIDN’T INCLUDE OFF-EXCHANGE ACA POLICIES in their 100K - 200K projection?? I heard something about it but assumed they were just pulling numbers out of their asses. This is actually worse in some ways. https://t.co/S2qJetjdTS
It's important to keep in mind that they knew damned well that killing the mandate penalty without replacing it with some other type of "negative inducement" to encourage people to enroll in a fully ACA-compliant policy was a really, really bad idea. Proof? Both the GOP House and Senate versions of their ACA "replacement" bill included an alternative to the mandate penalty:
Under the AHCA, the individual mandate is wiped out...except it's replaced with a 30% premium surcharge for people who don't maintain continuous coverage for more than 2 months.
(sigh) OK, gather 'round children, and let me tell you the story of how Cost Sharing Reductions went from being a thorn in the side of the Obama Administration to becoming a massive tree branch jammed into the kidney of Congressional Republicans. The following is an updated version of a lengthy post of mine from about six months ago.
The Cost Sharing Reduction (CSR) payment controversy has only really been sucking up a huge amount of political and policy oxygen for the past year and a half, since Donald Trump took office, but actually started long before then. Why? Because the whole reason the CSR payments were discontinued in the first place is a federal lawsuit filed by John Boehner on behalf of the House Republican Caucus back in 2014.
(sigh) Dammit, sure enough, as I expected, the full Michigan state Senate has gone ahead and passed the state Senator Mike Shirkey's "God's Safety Net" bill which would impose 29-hour-plus work requirements on 680,000 low-income Medicaid enrollees even though the vast majority of them already work, go to school, are medically fragile, take care of other medical fragile family members, elderly relatives or children and so forth. It was, as you'd expect, a party-line vote:
Able-bodied Medicaid recipients in Michigan may soon have to choose between finding a job or losing health insurance.
...Democrats condemned the proposal as harmful to thousands of Medicaid recipients who would not meet the several exemptions spelled out in SB 897 and said such a move is also illegal. Majority Republicans brushed aside those objections, and the bill passed 26-11.
I've repeatedly written about how Donald Trump is still deperately trying to sabotage the ACA by any means necessary. Last year it was all about a combination of regulatory and legislative attacks, but aside from repealing the ACA's individual mandate (which was, admittedly, a pretty ugly blow), the GOP-held Congress was unsuccessful at tearing it down legislatively.
Therefore, for 2018, Trump has decided to double down on the regulatory side...and one of the main ways he hopes to achieve this is by opening up the floodgates on so-called "Short-Term, Limited Duration" policies, which aren't subject to most ACA requirements and therefore are a) free to siphon off healthy ACA-compliant enrollees into b) substandard healthcare plans which can leave thousands of people in dire straits.
Two more Democratic senators are introducing a bill that would create a version of Medicare for some working-age Americans, offering yet another sign that government-run insurance will figure prominently into the Democratic Party’s health care agenda going forward.
By my count, there are now a total of 5 different Universal Coverage policies officially on the table from Congressional Democrats, in addition to the two "ACA 2.0" bills proposed (both of which are presumably meant as stopgap measures until one of the UC bills can also get passed and take hold and be implemented a few years later). These bills include ones from Bernie Sanders ("Medicare for All"); Tim Kaine/Michael Bennet ("Medicare X"); Brian Schatz ("Medicaid Option"); and my preferred option of those I've seen so far, the plan from the Center for American Progress ("Medicare Extra"). The newest entry from Sen. Merkley & Murphy is apparently called "Medicare Part E":
Over at the Kaiser Family Foundation, Karen Pollitz and Gary Claxton have published a handy explainer which goes over the basics of the various types of NON-ACA individual market policies...specifically, the "Short Term" and "Association" plans which Donald Trump is attempting to flood the market with by essentially removing any restrictions or regulations on them, but also the "Idaho Style" plans which were rejected by HHS for being flat-out illegal as well as the "Farm Bureau" junk plans which Iowa recently decided to open the floodgates on (Tennessee already had a similar setup, and sure enough, it has proven pretty devastating to Tennessee's ACA market since 2014 as a result). The whole thing is worth a read, but in the early part of their explainer, however, they also happened to neatly lend support to my estimates from last week regarding the unsubsidized market:
...Maitre, 62, spends dozens of hours each week babysitting her grandchildren and providing their working parents with free child care. But none of that time or her community service would count as work under an advancing plan that would require Medicaid recipients to spend 29 hours a week at a job or risk losing their health care coverage.
...The Republican-led Senate Competitiveness Committee approved the legislation a short time later in a 4-1 vote. The lone committee Democrat voted against the plan to reform the government health care program for lower-income residents, which has grown significantly in recent years after the state expanded eligibility under former President Barack Obama’s signature health care law.
It now moves on to the full state Senate, as I expected.
NOTE: I'm well aware that the math below is of the "back of the envelope" variety and has a lot of caveats and assumptions.
Today is Tax Day, so I decided to do a fun little exercise (OK, it's not fun for those getting stuck with the bill).
Last week I crunched the numbers and determined that roughly 6.5 million middle-class Americans enrolled in individual market policies are being hit with an average health insurance premium hike of around $960 apiece this year specifically caused by the various sabotage efforts put forth by Donald Trump and Congressional Republicans last year. This primarily consisted of the CSR remimbursement payment cut-off, but also included smaller factors like threats (later made reality) to not enforce and/or repeal the individual mandate; slashing marketing/outreach budgets by 90% and 40% respectively; and so forth.
I have mixed feelings about private health insurance companies and, by extension, health insurance brokers.
On the one hand, as a universal coverage advocate who'd prefer that it be pretty much all publicly funded, I see private, profit-based insurance carriers as a middleman which shouldn't be necessary in the first place.
On the other hand, until the day comes where universal coverage via a single Medicare-for-All-like national healthcare system, insurance carriers are necessary, and since they offer a variety of different policies with different networks, coverage features, premiums, deductibles, co-pays and so forth, that means a lot of hand-holding is also necessary.
A couple of weeks ago I reported that the state legislature and governor of deep red Utah has agreed to partly expand Medicaid under the ACA...
Gov. Gary Herbert signed a measure Tuesday to give more than 70,000 needy Utahns access to government health coverage, ending years of failed attempts on Capitol Hill to expand Medicaid in the state.
But whether House Bill 472 ever takes effect still remains uncertain. Under President Obama’s signature Affordable Care Act (ACA), the Utah law needs approval by the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), which has sent mixed signals on whether it will fully sign off.
Even if CMS does approve HB472, it will likely be about a year — even on an aggressive schedule — before the state can begin enrolling people for coverage.
This morning I was contacted on Twitter by a woman in Louisville, Kentucky who appears to be in pretty dire straits:
On 7/1/18, in Ky, my Medicaid/ ACA will be canceled. I may still need a brain shunt, LP #8, RXs, PT, etc. I was informed that my PCP could write a letter stating I was "Medically Fragile" but even then the provider has final say. Like fox guarding hen house. Please help me/DM
I am a disabled attorney living with my 76-year-old mother who takes care of me. In 2011, I was bitten by a tick and was infected with Ehrlichiosis Chaffeensis and Rickettsia. A week later, I contracted Coxsackie B4 virus. Because I was kept on antibiotics for 19 years, I had no immune system to fight these illnesses.
And now, with quick state-level action in both Maryland and New Jersey in recent days, I decided to expand this project across every state. I've started color-coding the status of each bill and am even adding some recent/past bills and/or waivers which have failed as I go (i.e., the failed/delayed mandate penalty restoration efforts in Connecticut and Maryland).
This is a work in progress, so the table is probably pretty incomplete for now and will likely be changing constantly as various bills are introduced, moved to committee, voted on, pass/fail, signed/vetoed by governors and actually implemented (or legally challenged).
UPDATE 4/20/18: Whew! OK, I've incorporated a bunch of Louise Norris' links for several states and have moved it to a full Google Docs spreadsheet. Be warned, it's pretty big now...
A few days ago I noted that Maryland Governor Larry Hogan had signed a bipartisan bill into law which creates a $380 million reinsurance fund which should cancel out up to 21% of next year's looming individual market premium hikes.
However, I forgot to mention the other important thing that the same bill does: Evidently it would also head off Donald Trump's attempt to open the floodgates on the type of minimally-regulated "short-term" and "association" plans which would further damage the ACA-compliant individual market risk pool:
(C) THIS SUBTITLE APPLIES TO ANY HEALTH BENEFIT PLAN OFFERED BY AN ASSOCIATION, A PROFESSIONAL EMPLOYEE ORGANIZATION, OR ANY OTHER ENTITY, INCLUDING A PLAN ISSUED UNDER THE LAWS OF ANOTHER STATE, IF THE HEALTH BENEFIT PLAN COVERS ELIGIBLE EMPLOYEES OF ONE OR MORE SMALL EMPLOYERS AND MEETS THE REQUIREMENTS OF SUBSECTION (A) OF THIS SECTION.
I've noted before that now that the Republicans in Congress have repealed the ACA's much-hated (but vitally necessary) individual mandate penalty (effective 2019), the odds of it being reinstated at the federal level are virtually zilch. Even if there's a massive blue wave in November and the Democrats are able to retake both the House and Senate, they're extremely unlikely to be willing to face the same type of firestorm/backlash that they did back in 2009-2010 over it.
As I noted last month, the Republican-controlled Michigan State Senate is planning on jumping on board the pointless, wasteful, cruel "work requirement" bandwagon which is all the rage among the GOP types these days.
Sure enough, they're planning on ramming it through within the next week: The Michigan Senate’s Competitiveness Committee is expected to hold a hearing on SB 897, a bill that would impose a work requirement on over 670,000 adult Michiganders with Medicaid health coverage...or nearly 7% of the state population.
The committee chair and the bill’s sponsor, Senator Mike Shirkey (SD-16) is planning on pushing the committee vote through ASAP and then kicking it over to the full state Senate right away.
The "stupidest thing possible" being referred to was whether or not CMS Administrator Seema Verma is planning on putting the kibosh on Silver Loading and the Silver Switcharoo starting in 2019:
The head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services would not say Thursday if the Trump administration is considering setting limits on how insurers that sell Obamacare plans structure subsidies for their customers.
"I'm not going to comment on the agency's deliberations," CMS Administrator Seema Verma said when asked by the Washington Examiner about rumors that had circulated about the issue. When pressed about whether any conversations had occurred, Verma said, "I'm just going to leave it at that."
WARNING: LOTS OF WONKY NUMBER-CRUNCHY STUFF BELOW.
Skip to the end if you just want to see my findings for every state, but be warned that there's a bunch of caveats/disclaimers involved.
UPDATE: To clarify, you're looking for the VERY LAST TABLE. Not that one...no, not that one either...the one at the very bottom of the post. I've added a highlighted note right above it.
The total individual/family policy health insurance market was roughly 10.6 million people in 2013. This included people enrolled in either "grandfathered" policies (i.e., policies enrolled in prior to the ACA being signed into law in 2010) or in "transitional" policies (those enrolled in between 2010 and late 2013, just before the ACA required all new individual market policies to be fully compliant with the new healthcare law.
How many of those 10.6 million people are still enrolled in grandfathered (GR) or transitional (TR) policies today? Unfortunately, there seems to be very little available data about just how many people are still in these policies. The Kaiser Family Foundation gave a rough estimate of around 2.1 million people last year, which sounded about right to me. However...Kaiser didn't include a state-level breakout of their estimates, and of course it's a year later so that number, if accurate, has probably shrunk a bit more.
Last month I noted that while Congressional Republicans spent all of 2017 desperately attempting to "blow up" the Affordable Care Act via a combination of legislation, the Trump Administration simultaneously tried to tear down the law via various regulatory sabotage efforts. This year the GOP Congress appears to have mostly given up on their mischief (they did manage to partially wound the ACA by repealing the individual mandate), the Trump Administration is doubling down on regulatory sabotage, laying what I've termed "Regulatory Siege" to the law.
In my mind, "phase one" included the non-legislative stuff Trump did last year, including stuff like cutting off CSR reimbursements, slashing the Open Enrollment Period in half, slashing marketing funding by 90%, slashing the outreach budget by 40% and so on. "Phase two" includes the previously-announced #ShortAssPlans executive order, CMS allowing work requirements for Medicaid and so forth (individual mandate repeal belongs here as well, although that was legislative, not regulatory...although there's overlap as you'll see below).
The total individual/family policy health insurance market was roughly 10.6 million people in 2013. This included people enrolled in either "grandfathered" policies (i.e., policies enrolled in prior to the ACA being signed into law in 2010) or in "transitional" policies (those enrolled in between 2010 and late 2013, just before the ACA required all new individual market policies to be fully compliant with the new healthcare law.
How many of those 10.6 million people are still enrolled in grandfathered (GR) or transitional (TR) policies today? Unfortunately, there seems to be very little available data about just how many people are still in these policies.
Health Insurance Subsidies and Related Spending.Outlays for health insurance subsidies and related spending are estimated to increase by $10 billion, or 21 percent, in 2018.8 That jump mostly stems from an average increase of 34 percent in premiums for the second-lowest-cost “silver” plan in health insurance marketplaces established under the Affordable Care Act. (Those premiums are the benchmark for determining subsidies for plans obtained through the marketplaces.) Over the 2019–2028 period, the average growth in spending is projected to lessen considerably, to just under 5 percent per year, as per-beneficiary spending rises with the costs of providing medical care. CBO estimates that, under current law, outlays for health insurance subsidies and related spending would rise by about 60 percent over the projection period, increasing from $58 billion in 2018 to $91 billion by 2028.
Yup, thanks to deliberate sabotage from the first two years of the Trump Administration, premiums have spiked by ~30% this year and will do so again next year, requiring federal spending on subsidies to increase accordingly.
Positive Blue Cross results trigger rebates to consumers
It is legally required to return about $30 million of its 2017 profit to subscribers.
After three years of losses in the state’s market where individuals buy health insurance, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota made so much money last year that it has to give some back.
The Eagan-based carrier, which is the state’s largest nonprofit health plan, disclosed last week that it expects to provide $30 million in consumer rebates as required by rules in the federal Affordable Care Act (ACA).
Analysts said that Blue Cross likely isn’t alone in having overshot with rates last year, since insurers across the country have been struggling to figure out how much premium revenue they need to cover the cost of medical bills in the individual market.
In Minnesota, rebates driven by big margins are a surprising cap to a year that started with fears that mounting losses would cause a market collapse.
Maryland Governor Larry Hogan signed a bipartisan bill on Thursday that state officials say will help keep healthcare premiums from spiking again next year.
The bill creates what’s known as a reinsurance program for the state’s health insurance marketplace, which was created as part of the Affordable Care Act.
...Without the fix or any action in Washington, Maryland officials predicted that healthcare premiums in 2019 could jump up to 50 percent, driving more of the 150,000 people to abandon the state’s marketplace — possibly leading to its collapse.
As you may have noticed, I'm on a bit of a grandfathered/transitional plan data kick this week (there's a reason for it which you'll understand next week). These numbers are tricky to hunt down, since they aren't tracked by the ACA exchanges. Most states either don't track them at all or don't make it easy for the public to locate, and it's even treated as a proprietary trade secret in a few states.
The Kaiser Family Foundation gave a rough estimate of around 2.1 million people still being enrolled in GF/TR plans last year, but they never broke it out by state. Plus, of course, that was last summer; since no one can newly enter these types of policies, their numbers continue to gradually shrink year after year.
OK, I'm just seeing this now so I could be seriously misreading the article, but if I'm not, this is quite the eye-opener:
Virginia is on the cusp of expanding Medicaid to 400,000 low-income residents, after a veteran Republican state senator said Friday that he is willing to split with his party and help Democrats realize a goal they have been chasing for years.
Virginia state Sen. Frank Wagner (Virginia Beach) said he supports allowing more poor people to enroll in the federal-state healthcare program on two conditions.
He wants the plan structured so that Medicaid recipients do not suddenly lose coverage if their earnings rise. And he wants a tax credit or some other help for middle-income people who already have insurance but are struggling to pay soaring premiums and co-pays.
Earlier today I wrote an extensive post about California's individual market, specifically breaking out the number of off-exchange policies, including a rare look at some hard grandfathered plan enrollment numbers.
I've also managed to dig up a fascinating document from 2010 buried on the Alabama Insurance Department's website, which provides quite a bit of demographic insight into Alabama'soverall health insurance market. While all of this info is now 8 years out of date (and even precedes the first ACA open enrollment period), it does provide a few clues into estimating what's going on in Alabama today.
This first table shows exactly what Alabama's individual market looked like: 164,404 people were enrolled in pre-ACA "major medical" policies in 2010:
The California Health Care Foundation is a nonprofit philanthropic organization. From their About page:
The California Health Care Foundation is dedicated to advancing meaningful, measurable improvements in the way the health care delivery system provides care to the people of California, particularly those with low incomes and those whose needs are not well served by the status quo. We work to ensure that people have access to the care they need, when they need it, at a price they can afford.
A few days ago, I ran a comparison of the average unsubsidized (full price) 2018 premium increases for each state which I had projected last fall against a study last month by the Urban Institute in which they reported the actual average premium increases, by state, of some of the ACA policies available on the exchange. Urban wasn't able to examine every plan, but they did a full analysis on the Lowest Cost Silver, 2nd Lowest Cost Silver (benchmark plan) and Lowest Cost Gold policies in each market and statewide.
Urban's analysis concluded that depending on how you looked at their data, the overall national average increase was between 29-32% year over year...versus my own national projection of around 29.7%.
I didn't fare so well at the state level: I was within 5 percentage points of their actual averages in 31 states, and within 10 points in 6 more. I was way off in the other 14 for various reasons.
OK, I'm finally able to get back to digging into the meat of the FINALLY just-released 2018 Open Enrollment Report from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid.
In Part 2, I'm looking at the actual 2018 Open Enrollment Period Public Use Files, which break out a ton of demographic info by state, county and even zip code depending on the state (some of it is available for all 50 states + DC, while other data is only available for the 39 states hosted by HealthCare.Gov).
First up: As I noted earlier today, there's around a 10,000 enrollee discrepancy between the national total I came up with back in early February and CMS's official total. I compared my state-by-state totals against CMS's report and found differences in 5 of the state-based exchanges:
NOTE: THIS IS A LIVE BLOG, SO CHECK BACK FREQUENTLY FOR UPDATES.
Yes, at long last (3 weeks later than last year, which itself was 4 days later than in 2016), the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid has finally released the official, final 2018 Open Enrollment Report.Let's dig in!
This report summarizes enrollment activity in the individual Exchanges during the Open Enrollment Period for the 2018 plan year (2018 OEP) for all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Approximately 11.8 million consumers selected or were automatically re-enrolled in Exchange plans during the 2018 OEP. An accompanying public use file (PUF) includes detailed state-level data on plan selections and demographic characteristics of consumers. The methodology for this report and detailed metric definitions are included with the public use file.
The Kaiser Family Foundation runs a widely-respected monthly natonal tracking poll about healthcare issues. The questions they ask sometimes change from month to month, and this month they asked a whole bunch of questions about...the Individual Market and the ACA exchanges. In other words, pretty much a bonanza of data-nuggety goodness for this site:
As part of the Republican tax reform plan signed into law at the end of 2017, lawmakers eliminated the ACA’s individual mandate penalty starting in 2019. About one-fifth of non-group enrollees (19 percent) are aware the mandate penalty has been repealed but is still in effect for this year. Regardless of the lack of awareness, nine in ten non-group enrollees say they intend to continue to buy their own insurance even with the repeal of the individual mandate. About one-third (34 percent) say the mandate was a “major reason” why they chose to buy insurance.
Republicans also want to use the funding bill to go after Obamacare. They would prohibit funding for administering or enforcing the health care law, prohibit the administration from collecting a fee from insurance companies to run the insurance exchanges and eliminate more than half a billion dollars in funding for managing the program at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
(sigh) I'm not quite sure how "prohibiting funding for administration" differs from "eliminating funding for managing the program", but it amounts to the same thing: They're trying to shut down CMS's ability to actually run the ACA.
The good news is that none of that ended up making it into the omnibus bill.
Regular readers know that I've developed a tradition over the past three years of tracking the average unsubsidized premium rate increases for the ACA-compliant individual market, painstakingly poring over the rate filings for every carrier in every state and running a weighted average by their market share.
Every year there are numerous challenges and headaches which get in the way, including things as obvious as "not every carrier publishes the number of enrollees they have covered" to complex situations like "carrier X is dropping out of the on-exchange market in half the counties of the state but is sticking around in the off-exchange market". In addition, many carriers submit an initial rate request...followed a few months later by a revised one...neither of which might end up matching the final premium changes approved by state regulators. Sometimes there may be 2-3 more revised filings along the way which muddy the waters even further.
