More Bad News.

[Spike Trader]

Almost All Obamacare Enrollees Are Paying For Coverage.

The Obama administration on Thursday finally revealed how many people paid for Obamacare on the national and state health insurance exchanges: 7.3 million.

Since President Barack Obama announced in April that sign-ups on the Obamacare exchange marketplaces had surpassed 8 million, skeptics have demanded to know what portion of health insurance enrollees had actually paid for their coverage. At a hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Marilyn Tavenner offered a partial answer at last.

"As of Aug. 15 this year, we have 7.3 million Americans enrolled in health insurance marketplace coverage and these are individuals who paid their premiums. We are encouraged by the number of consumers who paid their premiums and continue to enroll in the marketplace coverage every day through special enrollment periods," Tavenner said.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/18/obamacare-enrollment_n_5843402.html

 

[DHOHHI]

So roughly 10% have already quit paying .... and of the remainder almost 90% are getting subsidies. Some people pay as little as $1/month and get the rest paid for by taxpayers.

http://www.opposingviews.com/i/heal...-gets-obamacare-health-plan-111-month-through

Ms. Roach can now spend the $490+ she's saving on more food .. she looks undernourished.

 

[Covertibility]

Good job Mr. President. No doubt his presidency will be regarded as a success.

 

[Ricter]

So roughly 10% have already quit paying .... and of the remainder almost 90% are getting subsidies. Some people pay as little as $1/month and get the rest paid for by taxpayers.

http://www.opposingviews.com/i/heal...-gets-obamacare-health-plan-111-month-through

Ms. Roach can now spend the $490+ she's saving on more food .. she looks undernourished.

You are still stuck in the "calories in calories out" paradigm. Time to shift.

 

[DHOHHI]

You are still stuck in the "calories in calories out" paradigm. Time to shift.

No one should get health insurance for $1.11/month, let alone a 57 year old obese woman.

 

[Ricter]

No one should get health insurance for $1.11/month, let alone a 57 year old obese woman.

I agree with the $1.11 part. But you do need to get up to speed on the hormonal paradigm on obesity. : )

 

[Scataphagos]

No one should get health insurance for $1.11/month, let alone a 57 year old obese woman.

Hey... when you're a parasite.... you don't worry about what is "righteous" or "fair"... you just take take whatever you can get (the more the better, too).

 

[Tsing Tao]

Almost All Obamacare Enrollees Are Paying For Coverage.

The Obama administration on Thursday finally revealed how many people paid for Obamacare on the national and state health insurance exchanges: 7.3 million.

Since President Barack Obama announced in April that sign-ups on the Obamacare exchange marketplaces had surpassed 8 million, skeptics have demanded to know what portion of health insurance enrollees had actually paid for their coverage. At a hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Marilyn Tavenner offered a partial answer at last.

"As of Aug. 15 this year, we have 7.3 million Americans enrolled in health insurance marketplace coverage and these are individuals who paid their premiums. We are encouraged by the number of consumers who paid their premiums and continue to enroll in the marketplace coverage every day through special enrollment periods," Tavenner said.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/18/obamacare-enrollment_n_5843402.html

From your link... LOL!!

But the 7.3 million enrollment figure doesn't tell the whole story. The Department of Health and Human Services can't provide the total enrollment tally, including paid and unpaid, since April because the computer system that would process those records isn't fully operational, a department official said. A manual evaluation would be required to find that number, the official said.

 

[Tsing Tao]

a little more balanced look than that of the HuffandPuff post.

Obamacare Enrollees Are Paying Premiums. We Think.

We know that 8 million people have enrolled in Obamacare. But how many of them have actually paid their premiums? The Barack Obama administration has been curiously silent on this point. By now, it must have the data, but for some reason, it chose not to issue it.

Until now. Apparently, Marilyn Tavenner, the head of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, just told Congress that 7.3 million people have paid premiums and are currently enrolled in exchange policies. What does that mean?

It’s a little hard to tell, because according to Jason Millman of the Washington Post, she also says that this is a “snapshot” of Aug. 15, not a cumulative figure. Why does that matter? Because there’s a 90-day grace period between missing a premium payment and getting dropped from your insurance. The administration says that this figure only includes people who have “paid their premiums." But what does that mean? That they paid a premium at least once? Or that they are current on their premium payments?

Remember that out of 8 million total enrollments, almost 4 million people signed up in March and early April, most of them in those last few weeks (about 910,000 just in April). Those people didn’t have their premiums due until May, or June 1. So someone who paid a single premium in May or June and then stopped paying would still be in the grace period, and they would technically still be covered by an exchange policy, pending payment. For that matter, if you started coverage in January and stopped paying six months later, you would still show up as enrolled in Tavenner’s figure.

How much does this matter? It depends on the relative attrition rate: How many people stopped paying, and how many people never paid at all? If the latter accounts for almost all the attrition, then we can expect that 7.3 million is pretty close to the final figure for paid enrollment in 2014; I wouldn’t expect it to fall much below 7 million,1 and it might be well over that figure. If the “stopped paying” group is substantial, then we can expect this number to grow substantially as policies written during the late-enrollment surge lapse.

All of which points to the need for better data on what’s happening with the exchanges. The administration mysteriously stopped issuing enrollment reports as soon as open enrollment closed, leaving us to guess what’s happening from insurer statements and partial data like this.

Frankly, I’m kind of surprised that this is the first time we’ve heard those numbers. They’re pretty good. Oh, sure, they’re not as good as the optimists hoped, but it’s on the low end of estimates from industry expert Bob Laszewski, and certainly a lot better than the numbers we’ve been hearing from insurers. I expected them to be a lot worse, based somewhat on the insurer statements, but also because I figured the administration would have released them if they weren’t really awful. Obviously, the administration would prefer to tout the 8 million enrollment figure, but it has still exceeded the enrollment projected by the Congressional Budget Office for 2014. Why not stand proud?

One thing to note is what this means for the future: The administration needs to nearly double this enrollment in order to reach the CBO’s projection of 13 million exchange policies in 2015. How easy will that be?

I’m afraid I fall back on a standard answer when I write these columns: There’s no way to know. Open enrollment will be much shorter this year, November to February, and won’t be accompanied by the same sort of publicity blitz. It may get good word-of-mouth publicity, as people encourage friends and relatives to sign up. But you also won’t have the same kind of pent-up demand. So we’ll just have to see. Hopefully, by then, the administration will be able to offer us more complete data to work with.