Today is the Day of the Dead – a cheerful celebration to remember family members who have died.
People in Mexico – and increasingly the United States – use skulls, altars and special food to mark Dia de los Muertos. In addition to remembering people who are no longer with us, seven to 12 million Americans can mark the passing of their insurance policies as well. The numbers were bad to begin with: 500,000 people in only three states had received cancellation notices as of last week. Now, as some have predicted, the total number could be up to 75 percent of policies in the individual insurance market.
Why is this happening? One reason is because the policies don’t cover the 10 essential benefits that the ACA requires.
People with those policies make up only 5 percent of the entire population, but that is still 10 to 15 million people. The New York Times spoke with three people who are in this situation: One expects to pay more. One expects to pay less. And one is just trying to figure it all out.
The NYT also has a comprehensive graphic that explains why many of these policies are being cancelled. The only individual policies that insurers could continue to offer are the ones grandfathered in:
If a policy was in effect when the law passed in March 2010 and has not been changed significantly, people already on the plan could remain on it, and the plan would not have to meet the new requirements.
The Washington Post explains the cancellations this way:
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
These cancellations are, essentially, a lot of grandfathered plans exiting the insurance marketplace. From an insurance company’s vantage point, grandfathered plans are a bit of a dead end: They can’t enroll new subscribers and are really constrained in their ability to tweak the benefit package or cost-sharing structure. There’s not a whole lot of business sense, for a managed care company, in maintaining a health plan that doesn’t meet the health law’s new requirements.
This new number is only the latest piece of bad mathematical news for the Affordable Care Act. Numbers on the other side of the coin – new enrollments in insurance – are so amazingly bad that a Tea Party strategist couldn’t have made up a worse number. Six people enrolled on the launch day of HealthCare.gov and the totals went up only slightly from there.
The Advisory Board has updated its count of enrollees in the federal and state exchanges. Their count is 150,033 people as of Oct. 30 who have picked a plan or enrolled in Medicaid. Their latest update confirms that more than half of these “enrollments” are going to Medicaid, not private plans: As of Oct. 30, at least 109,818 of those 150,033 enrollees had signed up for Medicaid or other public programs.
The NYT is also keeping a count of enrollment numbers, and their total is even less than the Advisory Board’s: 116,157.
If the tech surge doesn’t fix things fast, the Democrats will need to have a Day of the Dead altar for Obamacare in November 2014.
