ACA Round-Up: Robust Marketplace Enrollment, CBO On Defining Health Insurance, And More

As of December 19, 2016, the extended deadline for enrolling in coverage for January 1, 2017, 6,356,488 consumers were covered by plans selected on HealthCare.gov, the Department of Health and Human Services announced on December 21. This was over 400,000 more than last year when applications closed for January 1, 2016 coverage on December 17, 2015. This included 2,049,127 new consumers and 4,307,361 returning consumers. Over 2.3 million signed up between December 11 and 19. These numbers include neither state marketplace enrollees nor 2016 enrollees who will be batch auto-enrolled for 2017 over the next few days. In 2016, state marketplace enrollees accounted for 24 percent of the total enrollees, while auto-enrollments accounted for 18 percent. The states with the highest enrollment numbers were Florida with 1.3 million, Texas with 776,000, and North Carolina with 369,000. Miami alone accounted for 490,000 and Atlanta for 271,000. Although no demographic data was released with the report, HHS stated that there was a 36 percent increase in enrollment using mobile devices, which could indicate strong enrollment by younger enrollees. This latest enrollment snapshot was only one of several recent developments regarding the Affordable Care Act and health reform. On December 20, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released two blog posts, the first discussing how it intends to estimate insurance coverage under proposals to replace the ACA using refundable tax credits, and the s...
Source: Health Affairs Blog - Category: Health Management Authors: Tags: Following the ACA Insurance and Coverage Source Type: blogs