Stores selling Obamacare policies popping up across California

As shoppers hunt for holiday bargains this season, they may find something unusual for sale at the mall: Obamacare.

With enrollment deadlines looming, California officials, insurance companies and agents are staking out retail space to sign up thousands of people as part of the Affordable Care Act. These sales tactics reflect how dramatically the healthcare law is changing the insurance industry.

Until recently, most health insurance companies and agents didn't put much time into selling policies to individuals and focused more on catering to employers and large groups in the workplace. But the health insurance mandate and billions of dollars in federal premium subsidies have made individual policies a far more attractive market.

California's health insurance exchange and other government-run marketplaces are rushing to sign up people by Dec. 23, the deadline to have coverage in effect Jan. 1. Open enrollment lasts until March 31.

A state lawmaker and union organizers last week opened a mall store in a predominantly African American area of Los Angeles. In Orange County, insurance agents are signing up dozens of people each week at Laguna Hills Mall, and healthcare giant Kaiser Permanente has rented five retail locations in Northern California to sell exchange policies.

The Covered California exchange has posted solid enrollment since opening Oct. 1, primarily through its website and call centers. It has signed up nearly 80,000 people in private health plans through Nov. 19 and an additional 135,000 people have applied for Medi-Cal, the state's Medicaid program for the poor.

Via: LA Times

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Loyal Obama Supporters, Canceled by Obamacare

San Francisco architect Lee Hammack says he and his wife, JoEllen Brothers, are “cradle Democrats.” They have donated to the liberal group Organizing for America and worked the phone banks a year ago for President Obama’s re-election.

Since 1995, Hammack and Brothers have received their health coverage from Kaiser Permanente, where Brothers worked until 2009 as a dietician and diabetes educator. “We’ve both been in very good health all of our lives – exercise, don’t smoke, drink lightly, healthy weight, no health issues, and so on,” Hammack told me.

The couple — Lee, 60, and JoEllen, 59 — have been paying $550 a month for their health coverage — a plan that offers solid coverage, not one of the skimpy plans Obama has criticized. But recently, Kaiser informed them the plan would be canceled at the end of the year because it did not meet the requirements of the Affordable Care Act. The couple would need to find another one. The cost would be around double what they pay now, but the benefits would be worse.

“From all of the sob stories I’ve heard and read, ours is the most extreme,” Lee told me in an email last week.

I’ve been skeptical about media stories featuring those who claimed they would be worse off because their insurance policies were being canceled on account of the ACA. In many cases, it turns out, the consumers could have found cheaper coverage through the new health insurance marketplaces, or their plans weren’t very good to begin with. Some didn’t know they could qualify for subsidies that would lower their insurance premiums.

Via: Pro Publica

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Obamacare Causes Thousands to Lose Health Insurance in San Diego

Thousands of San Diego county residents are losing their health insurance plans due to the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune.

Although President Barack Obama said that those who like their insurance could keep it, the law only protects those who signed up for plans before the law passed in March 2010. 

According to the Union-Tribune:

Faced with the new provision that they cannot exclude patients with pre-existing conditions, and a slew of other new regulations, insurance companies are eliminating most non-grandfathered policies.

About 2 million people in the state now buy coverage on the individual market, according to the California Healthcare Foundation. An additional 26 million get their coverage from their employer, a public agency or Medicare and are not affected.

It is not clear how many have received a policy expiration letter from their insurance company. A Blue Shield of California spokeswoman said the company has sent notices to nearly 10,000 individual customers in San Diego County, and a Health Net representative said “thousands” of its customers in the region were affected. Anthem Blue Cross and Kaiser Permanente, the area’s other two large insurers, did not respond to queries Tuesday.

Kaiser told Kaiser Health News that it had sent notices to 160,000 people across the state, which amounts to about half of its individual policy holders.

Via: WFB

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Boehner: More people will lose insurance under Obamacare than sign up in exchanges

House Speaker John A. Boehner predicted Wednesday that by the end of the month, more Americans will have lost their insurance by being kicked off existing health plans than the number who were able to sign up in the flawed online healthcare.gov website.

And the early numbers may back him up.

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Kaiser Health News reported this week that hundreds of thousands of Americans have received notices from their insurers canceling their policies: 300,000 from Florida Blue and 160,000 from Kaiser Permanente in California.

One industry analyst told Kaiser Health News the moves may be a way of insurers ridding their own rolls of costly consumers they don’t want, and pushing those people onto the federal health exchanges.

“When you begin to look at these hundreds of thousands of people, I think what you’re going to see at the end of October are more Americans are going to lose their health insurance than are going to sign up at these exchanges,” the Ohio Republican told reporters.

The White House and the rest of the Obama administration continued to struggle with explaining why the rollout of the online federal portal to sign up for the health exchanges has performed so badly.

Via: Washington Times

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