If You Like Your Plan...

Yeah, you know the rest.
As of this week, nine of the law’s 23 state co-ops — nonprofit health-insurance companies set up to help people enroll in Obamacare — have collapsed. Over 600,000 people who enrolled in co-op health plans will lose their insurance at the end of this year. Many of them were forced into the co-ops to begin with when Obamacare canceled their private insurance policies in 2013, meaning they will have lost their health insurance twice because of the law.

5 comments:

Elise said...

I considered a co-op in NJ but decided against it because I was afraid it would go out of business and leave me high and dry. That fear wasn't based on the co-op's rates but on the fact that some of what their website said made it sound like they didn't entirely understand the State laws governing health insurance in NJ. It wasn't very reassuring. Apparently most co-ops also didn't understand the economic laws governing income and outgo.

There is one thing I'm finding confusing about all the facts and figures regarding what percentage of people have signed up. The articles talk about how few eligible people have bought "exchange plans". It's not clear to me whether they are talking about only people who bought plans through the online marketplaces that I think of as "the exchanges" (like HealthCare.Gov) or if they are including people (like me) who buy individual insurance directly from an insurance company without going through such a marketplace. Does anyone know which it is?

I'm not arguing that Obamacare is working - I can't wait to see my insurance bill for 2016 - but it may be that most people who are not eligible for subsidies see no reason to struggle with the online system.

Ymar Sakar said...

https://ymarsakar.wordpress.com/2015/10/25/essential-oils-part-2-plant-therapy/

One of the lesser known benefits in having preparation connections.

Certainly it is easier to use than bureaucracy.

Grim said...

I don't know, Elise.

Texan99 said...

I haven't been able to figure that out, either. Sometimes the figures are stated in terms of how many previously uninsured Americans are now insured, which you would think includes all policies purchased, not only the ones purchased through the exchange. A HotAir piece the other day estimated 9.25MM previously uninsured people gained coverage, of which 8.99MM (97%) were Medicaid enrollees, leaving only 260K in “newly covered” people. Then it said that 4.79MM enrolled in new Obamacare plans, but 4.53MM lost their group employment-based coverage, also yielding a net of 260K. I couldn't tell whether the people who lost individual-market non-employment-based coverage were included in the 4.53MM. Or were they another chunk to take out of the 260K net new enrollees? That doesn’t seem quite right, because for years I’ve been hearing numbers more like 3-5MM who lost individual-market coverage.

Elise said...

I can't figure out if the people writing about this just figure everyone knows what population they mean; or if the people writing about this are just kind of sloppy in their analysis and/or their writing; or if the people writing about this don't really realize that their are people with individual policies who didn't buy them through the online exchanges; or if the simple fact is that no one really knows what the numbers are. Or other. Or all of the above.