In first month, the vast majority of Obamacare sign-ups are in Medicaid

The first month of the new health law’s rollout reveals an unexpected pattern in several states: a crush of people applying for an expansion of Medicaid and a trickle of sign-ups for private insurance.

This early imbalance — in some places, nine out of 10 enrollees are in Medicaid — has taken some experts by surprise. The Affordable Care Act, which expanded Medicaid to cover millions of the poorest Americans who couldn’t otherwise afford coverage, envisions a more even split with an expanded, robust private market.

“When we first saw the numbers, everyone’s eyes kind of bugged out,” said Matt Salo, who runs the National Association of Medicaid Directors. “Of the people walking through the door, 90 percent are on Medicaid. We’re thinking, what planet is this happening on?”

The yawning gap between public and private enrollment is handing Republicans yet another line of criticism against President Obama’s health overhaul — that the law is primarily becoming an expansion of a costly entitlement program.

Supporters, however, caution against reading too much into the early numbers. Some of the states that set up their own exchanges, including Maryland, are suffering Web site glitches similar to those of the national system, and that is delaying private plan enrollments.

Via: Washington Post

Continue Reading......

NY ObamaCare — Medicaid on steroids

When ObamaCare was being sold to the American people, one of the claims was that it would get uninsured Americans private insurance. Instead, it seems to be going in the opposite direction.

This week, The Post’s S.A. Miller and Carl Campanile reported that only a third of the 37,000 New Yorkers who enrolled in health care through the state’s new exchange signed up for private insurance. Nearly two-thirds opted for Medicaid, a state program partly funded by the federal government.

That’s just what’s got many insurers worried. Because to pay for ObamaCare’s benefits, they need a great many more healthy people to sign up.

It’s not just New York, either. We’re seeing the same trend in other states with their own health-care exchanges. Indeed, the number of new Medicaid enrollees in states like Kentucky, Washington and Oregon tops 80 percent. And why not? In contrast to the private plans, Medicaid is free.

These new waves of enrollment come after a years-long bipartisan effort to make it even easier to join Medicaid. That’s a big deal for New York, because the Empire State already spends more than any other state on Medicaid, with costs growing at an unsustainable 13 percent per year. Other states are going to find themselves with similar problems if the trend on the state exchanges continues.

And unless the trend reverses, it’s going ing to be a bigger headache for ObamaCare.

Via NYP

Continue Reading....

Dean: Obamacare Is Going To Be Reason Dems "Pick Up Seats In The House"

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: If your insurance plan conforms with the requirements of Obamacare you don't have to go to the exchanges

BILL KRISTOL: Which very, very few, almost no, about 15% of individually purchased self-insurance plans do. And why is that? It was a free market. If people wanted to buy all those benefits they could have.

HOWARD DEAN: No, no, no. We kicked all those people out of our state when we did this, and it was a good thing we did because they were taking 50% of every premium dollar and keeping it for themselves.

What this is doing is driving the fly-by-night insurance companies out of the market or forcing the good ones who have bad policies--

KRISTOL: Wait, wait, wait, so when Blue Shield drops, when Blue Shield and these huge companies drop 300,000 people in Florida, those are fly-by-night insurance companies?

DEAN: First of all, Blue Shield is for profit so it's Anthem I'm sure in Florida especially. Second of all, yeah, even good companies have crappy policies with enormous deductibles.

KRISTOL: But the government, but the government, that's going to be great.

DEAN: The government has a right to make sure that when you buy something it is what it's supposed to be.

KRISTOL: And to force you into the exchange? That's what they're doing.

DEAN: I think that's okay because I think in the long run, what's been happening in the past is those policies that get sold don't cover what you think they cover. And furthermore, and this used to happen when I was practicing, an insurance company would pull your insurance if you got sick. That is not allowed anymore under Obamacare.

I think Obamacare is in fact going to be the reason that we are going to pick up seats in the House and we are not going to lose the Senate.

Via: Real Clear Politics

Continue Reading.....

10 things Obamacare won’t tell you

1. “You might want to avoid signing up right away.”

In the offices of certain government officials and health insurance companies, a ticking countdown to a specific date was posted on the walls for months: Oct. 1. That was the day of the official ribbon-cutting for the exchanges created by the Affordable Care Act (commonly called Obamacare), when Americans began lining up for 2014 individual health insurance. But because the law’s future was uncertain until the Supreme Court upheld it in mid-2012, the exchanges had to scramble to get ready for opening day. Thirty-six states declined to set up their own exchanges for 2014 (each state has just one), so federal health officials had to do it instead — cramming years of work into a tight time frame. “Some people we’ve talked to will count it as a victory if the lights come on Oct. 1,” said Eric Johnson, a Columbia business professor and co-director of the university’s Center for the Decision Sciences, before the launch. (The small-business section of the exchanges in those 36 states won’t be able to accept online applications until November, the administration said, and some of the states running their own exchanges may also be running behind, having not yet announced when they will open to small employers.)

Indeed, grand-opening snafus ranged from jammed telephone lines and websites to technological glitches. “As much of a big deal as is made about [the launch] date, it is still a soft opening,” says Bill Melville, a market analyst for HealthLeaders-InterStudy, a research firm covering the exchanges. Lawmakers and even President Obama have acknowledged that the beginning has been more of a bumpy dress rehearsal, during which they’ve identified problems and deployed legions of software engineers to fix them.

Via: Market Watch

Continue Reading......

WHO IS THE MYSTERIOUS OBAMACARE GIRL FEATURED ON THE WEBSITE’S HOME PAGE?

You have probably seen her face before, but do you know who that brunette girl is smiling back at you when you log onto healthcare.gov?

Odds are you don’t, but you aren’t alone.

Multiple media outlets, including USA Today and Fox News, have scoured the Internet and looked through stock photo agencies’ catalogs, social media and even through photographs of Democratic operatives — but the mysterious girl has yet to be found.

–Have a tip? Scroll to the bottom of this page and leave it in our tip box–

(Image Source: Healthcare.gov)

The woman, who media outlets are desperately trying to identify, has become the face of the glitch-ridden healthcare.gov website.

CNN even devoted an entire segment to her, asking for information about who she may be.

Via: The Blaze

Continue Reading......

An Insurance Death Spiral?

The severe technical problems that continue to plague the federal Obamacare exchanges (and some state-run ones) have got people contemplating some pretty extraordinary scenarios.

Some of these have to do expressly with the fact that people cannot readily obtain coverage. The idea of delaying the individual mandate, which not two weeks ago was dismissed by the Democrats as a right-wing fantasy, is now being advanced by some Democratic senators, since you can’t very well fine people for not being able to use a site that doesn’t work. We may (and should) soon be talking about “grandfathering” all 2013 insurance plans, too, as millions of people in the individual market have their coverage cancelled with nowhere to go.

But the scenario most frequently talked about is the possibility of an “insurance death spiral” in the exchanges. And here I think two kinds of misunderstanding have been rampant — one that might cause us to understate the danger and another that might cause us to overstate it. Major adverse selection problems in the exchanges are, and always have been, likely, but a death spiral as it is usually understood is not. 

An insurance death spiral, or adverse-selection spiral, would be a kind of second-order consequence of the website fiasco: The fact that it is so difficult to sign up for exchange coverage may mean that only highly motivated consumers do sign up, and those are likely to be people with high expected health costs. If the exchanges end up containing too many people in poor health and not enough people in good health, insurers could take massive losses in 2014 and be forced to dramatically raise premiums for 2015 plans to better price the risk they would be taking on. Those higher premiums would cause even more healthy people to avoid getting coverage, leaving the risk pool in even worse shape and so driving even further premiums hikes, and the cycle would continue. Several states have seen this kind of catastrophic degradation of insurance risk pools over the years when introducing insurance rules like those that will govern the exchanges (most notably New York and Washington State, as Peter Suderman noted this week), and many observers (not to mention insurers) now fear we may see it in the new exchange system.

Via: NRO

Continue Reading.....

51% Favor Delaying Individual Mandate, 34% Oppose

Just over half of U.S. voters still want to delay the requirement that everyone must have health insurance, but support for delaying that mandate is down, despite the ongoing problems with government exchange websites set up to provide health insurance.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 51% of Likely U.S. Voters think the Obama administration should delay the individual mandate because of the problems experienced by the health insurance exchanges. Thirty-four percent (34%) disagree and oppose any delay in the requirement that every American have health insurance by January 1. Fifteen percent (15%) are not sure. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

(Want a free daily e-mail update? If it's in the news, it's in our polls). Rasmussen Reports updates are also available on Twitter or Facebook.

The survey of 1,000 Likely Voters was conducted on October 22-23, 2013 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC. See methodology.

Via: Rasmussen Reports

Continue Reading.....

Video: Contractor Hired To Build Obamacare Website Admits Even He Couldn’t Create An Account On The Exchange…

But don’t worry, when they finally fix the website the federal government will have no problem running the U.S. health care system.

“I logged onto to create an account, but I just never received a confirmation email. It didn’t work.”

Via: Weasel Zippers

Continue Reading.... 

REPORT: STATE EXCHANGE ENROLLMENTS MOSTLY MEDICAID, NOT PRIVATE INSURANCE PLANS

Defenders of President Obama’s signature health reform legislation claim the states that put effort into establishing their own exchanges, mostly Democrat-led, are signing people up successfully for ObamaCare. A new report, however, indicates that most of the individuals signing up in these state-run exchanges are enrolling into Medicaid.

Rachana Dixit at InsideHealthPolicy wrote Tuesday that enrollment into Medicaid in many of the state-run exchanges is “significantly outpacing the number of people that so far have enrolled into qualified health plans.” Medicaid enrollment numbers, Dixit observed, have reached tens of thousands in states such as Maryland, Washington, and Oregon.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) had projected that seven million people would enroll in the ObamaCare exchanges in 2014 while eight million would enroll in Medicaid. If Health and Human Services (HHS) hopes to get seven million enrolled by the end of March, about a third of them need to be healthy, young enrollees who will foot the bill for the higher risk patients who will need more health care services.

Dixit wrote that, in light of the significant problems the ObamaCare rollout has experienced, consultants tracking the exchanges are now wondering whether enough young and healthy enrollees will actually sign up to make ObamaCare work.

For example, Maryland’s state-run exchange - Maryland Health Connection - states 82,473 residents as of September had enrolled in Medicaid for coverage beginning January 1st, yet, between October 1st and 17th, there were 2,393 enrollments into the qualified health insurance plans.

Via: Breitbart

Continue Reading.....

Former official: Admin refused to bring in outside help for ObamaCare website for fear GOP would subpoena them; Update: Ten-year-old technology? Update: No improvement in week two; Update: Wasn’t tested until days before launch?

Via Lachlan Markay and Ace, who calls it “Nixonian.” This is the rare Hot Air item that might actually make liberals angrier at the White House than conservatives. If you’d staked your party’s credibility on realizing the utopian dream of universal health care only to have Obama deliver this fartburger, you’d be furious. Why anyone on either side still wants Sebelius in charge, I have no idea.

Facing such intense opposition from congressional Republicans, the administration was in a bunker mentality as it built the enrollment system, one former administration official said. Officials feared that if they called on outsiders to help with the technical details of how to run a commerce website, those companies could be subpoenaed by Hill Republicans, the former aide said. So the task fell to trusted campaign tech experts.

Very important to understand: Between this and the fact that HHS deliberately hid the price of insurance behind a reg wall on Healthcare.gov to reduce “rate shock,” the grand takeaway about the website’s failure is that O and his team made it much worse than it needed to be because they were terrified of transparency. And the reason they were terrified of transparency, both in the case of hiding the cost of the premiums from web users and hiding the site’s architectural problems from contractors who might be hauled before Congress, is because they know they’ve delivered a bad product. Put the premiums on the front page and the public, expecting “affordable care,” would recoil at the truth. Put the contractors at the witness table before Issa’s committee and the public, expecting that the government would “fix” health care, would recoil upon discovering that they can’t even build a website with three years’ lead time.

I don’t know what’s more amazing, that they’d place their own political comfort above creating a smoother user experience for the uninsured or that they somehow didn’t realize that a botched rollout on October 1 would be far more embarrassing than contractors talking to Republicans under oath. Or … would it? What was HHS so worried that outside contractors would tell the GOP that they preferred to risk total chaos on the exchanges during launch month instead?

Via: Hot Air

Continue Reading.....

Uninsured Americans Still Unfamiliar With Health Exchanges

Seven in 10 not familiar with exchanges, unchanged since September

PRINCETON, NJ -- Although federal and state health insurance exchanges opened on Oct. 1, 71% of Americans who lack health insurance -- the primary target group for the exchanges -- say they are "not too familiar" or "not familiar at all" with them, little changed from last month. At the same time, 28% of uninsured Americans say they are very or somewhat familiar with the exchanges, up slightly from 25% last month.

The exchanges are online insurance marketplaces that allow eligible Americans to find health insurance plans, as required by the 2010 Affordable Care Act. Many Americans have had difficulty signing up for insurance at the exchanges since they opened, due to heavy traffic on the websites and technical glitches plaguing them. It is unclear how many Americans have signed up for insurance since the exchanges opened; the Obama administration has not yet released enrollment figures.

Via: Gallup

Continue Reading.....

Obama administration expected half a million to enroll in exchanges in first month

The Obama administration expected nearly half a million people to enroll in the Obamacare exchanges in the first month, according to a Sept. 5 internal memo obtained by The Associated Press.

The memo reportedly lists enrollment goals for each state and, as the AP notes, if the glitches with the exchange website continue, the targets might end up out of reach.

While the Obama administration has said it will not be releasing enrollment numbers until mid-November, its nationwide sign-up estimate for Oct. 31 was 494,620. According to the report, that nearly half million figure was seen as a “low.”

By Dec. 31, the administration expected 3.3 million would have enrolled. The administration projected 7 million enrollees in the program’s first year.

The Obamacare exchanges opened on Oct. 1. The primary sign-up location online, however, opened to myriad problems and glitches that have continued throughout the month — with many would-be consumers unable to sign up.

The administration has been working since the launch to hammer out the issues. However, the surge in initial interest has waned, with web traffic to the site dropping 88 percent Oct 1 – Oct. 13, according to The Washington Post.

According to an analysis by Millward Brown Digital, a division of the market research company Kantar group, while the federal exchange website received 9.47 million unique visits, just 36,000 completed enrollment in the first week. The numbers do not include the states running their own exchanges or people who signed up offline.

The Atlantic estimates that at least 115,000 people completed applications through the state-based exchanges in the first two weeks of the exchange.

Via: Daily Caller
Continue Reading....