It’s not much talked about, but when people lost their jobs in the Great Recession, many of them lost their health insurance. That’s why it’s notable that the percentage of adult uninsured (16%) just reached the lowest level it’s been at since the month Barack Obama was first inaugurated as president. January was also the first month since the health exchanges were launched in which the number of new enrollees in ObamaCare actually exceeded the administration’s projections.
Forbes has an interesting article that includes a chart that shows how states are doing in terms of enrolling people compared to what the administration needs in order to reach their goal of six million enrollees. California is already at 118% of the goal, and Washington state is at 94%. What might surprise you is that Idaho is at 98% of the goal. Alabama (60%) is crushing New York (39%). It’s helps to have a governor who is really committed to the law, as you can see by comparing Kentucky (77%) to West Virginia (30%). Massachusetts (17%) is probably low because so few people were uninsured to begin with, but what’s going on with Wisconsin (28%), Iowa (25%), the District of Columbia (22%), and Arkansas (18%)?
Walker in Wisconsin is scaring people that a sign-up to Medicaid means that the IRS will be able to clawback money from your estate. It’s got people who are low income but own their home as their primary asset worried.
Arkansas’s legislature is still diddling with the eligibility of 85,000 people on extended Medicaid.
Congress passed a bill some time ago giving the states the ability to claw back from folks who use Medicaid for long term care. Here in Oregon they’ve made clear this does not apply to health care, and supposedly the administration will be clarifying this issue. Makes sense that, if you have to get on Medicaid because your income is too low for subsidies, you would not be jeopardized. Hopefully we’ll get big numbers signed up by 2017 so the ACA is not vulnerable to a potential R takeover.
But houses are seized to pay Medicaid bills, so people’s fears are not unjustified. Extended Medicaid does not have the asset restrictions so maybe there is no problem nut clarification is desirable for those who have assets but no income.
I’m saying that my understanding is that that confusion has been used by Walker to depress sign-up to Obamacare.
In North Carolina, the legislature killed an already approved Medicare Expansion plan and dumped the state exchange onto the federal exchange in July of last year.
The Republican sabotage campaign continues any way they can think of. I would look for some kind of Republican sabotage as explanations for other slow enrollment performance, like in New York.
The Bay State hired the same contractor that the Feds did to handle the websites on which residents were supposed to go to switch over from their current Commonwealth Care insurance to the ACA system. Apparently the contractor put nowhere near the thought and craft into the state exchanges that they did into the disastrous federal ACA rollout.
So everybody’s been encouraged to submit their applications via paper. It’s an unpretty landscape for now. And that probably has a lot to do with the low figures you note for Massachusetts.