The second enrollment season of Obamacare is just around the corner, and while the first year was given a thorough political challenge, year two is in many ways even more important.
Kaiser Health News, in a collaboration piece with the Washington Post, notes that in the second year, outreach efforts to the most elusive uninsured residents will be a key factor in upping the number of the newly insured.
Despite high-profile glitches and long wait times, the federal insurance exchange, healthcare.gov, enrolled more than 7.3 million individuals and counted nearly 8 million people who gained coverage through expanded Medicaid in states that opted in. And that doesn’t include successful state-run exchanges, like Covered California, Access Health CT or New York State of Health. Combined, all of that led to the lowest national rate of uninsured since 2008.
But this year, the federal exchange is hoping to both maintain last year’s enrollees while also adding up to 10 million more, with 6 million currently uninsured and another 4 million through Medicaid, according to estimates from the Congressional Budget Office.
Making matters more difficult, open enrollment this year is just three months, instead to the extend period last year that lasted for about six months.
While the effort last year to recruit the uninsured mainly involved exhorting the benefits of health insurance, the remaining uninsured view financial challenges as the biggest block. Accordingly, outreach efforts will focus on who qualifies for a subsidy and other forms of financial assistance, according to Kaiser Health News.
Yet a coverage gap does and likely will persist, especially in states that have decided to forgo the Medicaid expansion. From KHN:
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.
Although uninsured residents are scattered throughout the U.S., nearly half live in the South and many are concentrated in the two dozen states that chose not to expand their Medicaid programs, according to the Urban Institute analysis. The health law expanded Medicaid to more low-income adults, but a Supreme Court ruling made that provision optional for states.
As a result, nearly 5 million uninsured adults fall into a “coverage gap” – they make too much to qualify for the existing Medicaid program but too little to get financial help purchasing a plan through the marketplaces, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. (Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent program of the foundation).
