David K. Jones is an assistant professor at the Boston University School of Public Health. Nicholas Bagley is an assistant professor of law at the University of Michigan. Over the past week or so, they and their colleagues have posted a series of 3 pieces detailing the King v. Burwell response situation across 5 states currently at risk of losing their subsidies. The first part covered Florida. The second covered my home state of Michigan along with New Hampshire. The final piece looked at North Carolina and Utah.
The whole series is excellent and worth a read. However, there's one particular bit in the North Carolina section which caused me to #FacePalm so hard I may have caused a concussion, and my eyeballs to roll so far back in my head that I may need an ophthalmologist more than Luis Lang:
A state task force is developing a waiver request that would protect Hawaii’s employer-based health coverage law amidst other Affordable Care Act plans to be offered under the federal platform, the executive administration has confirmed.
...One concern is that employers could opt for cheaper federal plans in lieu of the state plans already in place.
Hawaii’s 41-year-old Prepaid Health Care Act requires employers to offer workers robust health insurance plans. Under the prepaid health care law, the Affordable Care Act’s bronze and silver plans are technically not legal in Hawaii.
Four of the nine health insurers selling Obamacare plans in Indiana are expecting to cut their average rates next year, according to filings with the Indiana Department of Insurance.
So, with all the fuss & bother over the imminent King v. Burwell decision, what's the deal here in the Wolverine state?
Well, first of all, here's what's at risk if the Supreme Court rules for the plaintiffs, Congress fails to pass a simple tweaking of the law to resolve the issue and the state administration fails to "establish" an exchange which passes muster with regard to the minimum legal definition required:
In other words, be very careful to understand the context of the "rate increase" story before drawing any conclusions when reading reports of either "excessively high" or "quite reasonable-sounding" 2016 premium rate change requests.
A couple of days ago I noted that the primary damage (but by no means the only damage) of the Supreme Court ruling for the plaintiffs in King v. Burwell would be for appx. 6.5 million people to have to shell out an average of over $1,600 in extra taxesthis year to keep their current healthcare policy through the end of 2015, plus a likely average 493% hike in premium rates if they want to keep the same policies in 2016.
However, seeing one big blobby spreadsheet isn't exactly conducive to capturing people's attention, so I've taken the liberty of whipping up social media-friendly individual state graphics. Feel free to share widely!
The California Assembly has approved a bill to designate pregnancy as a qualifying life event to allow women to purchase health plans through Covered California outside of the regular open enrollment period. The bill is now set for review by the state Senate.
In New York, three separate bills have been drafted with the same goal, in a bid to increase the odds that a version will be passed.
Moves like the one in California could influence federal policy on the issue, suggests Christina Postolowski, health policy manager at Young Invincibles.
Sec. Burwell responded in the only rational way possible: By pointing out that if [the Republican Party is] absolutely determined to destroy the lives of millions of likely voters across 34 states (including swing states like Florida, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin) while simultaneously forcing insurance premiums up an additional 35% - 45% for everyone else in those states (on top of whatever they were set to go up already), when it would literally take about 5 minutes for them to "fix" the very issue that they ginned up as the "problem" in the first place, there's not a hell of a lot that she can do to stop them.
...None of the above options involve anything that Sec. Burwell has any control over.
In other words, her only "contingency plan" is "try to convince the Republicans controlling the Supreme Court, Congress or those states to stop being colossal jackasses and actually do something to help the people they're supposed to be serving."
Not a plan likely to succeed, of course...but it's a plan.
A couple quick developments in the ongoing saga of Luis Lang, the guy from South Carolina with serious medical and insurance issues whose story went viral a few weeks back.
