Showing posts with label
ACA enrollment expansion difficulties.
Show all posts
Showing posts with label
ACA enrollment expansion difficulties.
Show all posts
"Obamacare enrollment is lagging far behind what economists had projected, the Congressional Budget Office said in a new report that cuts the total number of customers expected to buy plans on the exchanges from 21 million down to just 13 million this year.
Of those, 11 million will be getting government subsidies — down from the 15 million the CBO had projected just a year ago.
The updated projections came as part of the CBO’s 2016 budget outlook, and confirm the administration’s own dim estimates of how many people would take advantage of the health exchanges, which are at the heart of President Obama’s health law." - Obamacare enrollment projections down nearly 40 percent,
washingtontimes.com, 01/25/2015
Link to the entire article appears below:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/jan/25/obamacare-enrollment-projections-down-43-percent/
“Today, the Obama administration announced that it projected dramatically lower enrollment growth for Obamacare’s exchanges in 2016: only 1.3 million, compared to a prediction of 8 million when the law was passed five years ago.
The problem is fairly easy to understand. Obamacare imposed thousands of pages of new federal regulations on the market for private-sector health insurance purchased by individuals. These regulations mandated that all plans had to pay for a wide range of services, even if policyholders didn’t want them. They forced young people to pay double, and sometimes triple, what they had been paying before for coverage. And plans were required to provide higher financial payouts than they previously had to.
All of these bells and whistles cost money. And so, in 2014 alone, in the average U.S. county, Obamacare drove up the price of individually-purchased health insurance by 49 percent. In 2015 and 2016, additional double-digit rate hikes have been common throughout the country.
ACA enthusiasts disputed the significance of this problem, arguing that taxpayer-funded subsidies would compensate for the higher premiums. But there were always several flaws with that argument. First, subsidies don’t fall from the sky; they’re paid for by imposing additional costs on taxpayers. Second, the subsidies are only large enough for people whose incomes are near the poverty line. Those in the lower-middle class and above don’t receive subsidies that are large enough to compensate for Obamacare-induced rate shock.
In March, Caroline Pearson of Avalere Health published an analysis examining Obamacare enrollment relative to the number of people actually eligible for the law’s insurance subsidies. In a report entitled “Exchanges Struggle to Enroll Consumers as Income Increases,” she observed what should have been obvious in 2010: that those who are more exposed to Obamacare’s rate hikes—by being eligible for fewer subsidies—were not signing up.” - Flatlined: White House Says Obamacare Exchange Enrollment Growth To Collapse In 2016, Forbes, 10/15/2015
Link to the entire article appears below:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2015/10/15/flatlined-white-house-says-obamacare-exchange-enrollment-growth-to-collapse-in-2016/
“WASHINGTON—Millions fewer people will enroll in private health plans under the Affordable Care Act next year than the Congressional Budget Office had predicted, the Obama administration said Monday.
The developments are the latest sign that the law, which Democrats passed in 2010 to provide near-universal health insurance, is struggling to reach that goal quickly. Attracting new enrollees to the health law’s insurance exchanges has proven more difficult than advocates had predicted, and a slice of those who do sign up for plans haven’t kept up with premiums.
Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell said the administration was aiming for 9.1 million paid-up enrollees by the end of 2015, though the range could extend to 9.9 million, according to a new analysis conducted by her agency.
The exchanges, which reopen Saturday for the law’s second year of insurance enrollment, were expected to have 13 million people enrolled in private health plans under the law in 2015, according to an April 2014 projection by the nonpartisan CBO.
Around 7.1 million Americans currently have private coverage through the law’s exchanges, the administration said Monday. That is down from the 8 million the administration said had picked plans as of this spring, and from a figure of 7.3 million paid-up enrollees in mid-August.”
“Mike Perry, a pollster who conducts research for supporters of the law, said recent focus groups with people who were uninsured after the first year of sign-ups made clear they were a “harder group to reach” now. “They know their budget, and their budget has no room,” he said.”
“HHS officials also released new figures on their efforts to clear up data problems from the first sign-up period. They said they had cut off tax credits for December for 120,000 households that hadn’t responded to requests for more information about their income.
Another 112,000 people have had their coverage terminated because the federal government couldn’t confirm they were legally residing in the U.S., they said. That number is down slightly from an earlier announcement that the government was cutting off 116,000 people over immigration and citizenship status issues.” - Health-Law Enrollment in 2015 Won’t Meet Forecast, WSJ, 11/11/2014
Link to the entire article appears below:
http://online.wsj.com/articles/health-law-enrollment-in-2015-wont-meet-forecast-1415666606?KEYWORDS=health+law
