Obamacare Tag

Emergency room visits spiking, not declining....

It creeps, it crawls, it eats you alive!...

New data reveal the biggest category of complaints centers on getting confirmation of health plan enrollment and basic issues such as getting an identification card to obtain care. Many consumers have also encountered difficulty finding a doctor who accepts their new coverage, as well as frustration with inaccurate provider lists, according to the California Department of Managed Health Care. "If you have a medical condition and can't get care that is a very serious issue," said Marta Green, spokeswoman for the managed healthcare agency. "We are still working to resolve many of these cases." Health insurers and officials at the Covered California exchange say they are working hard too to address consumers' gripes. They say some problems are inevitable from such a massive overhaul and that the number of complaints is a small fraction of the more than 1 million Californians who signed up under the Affordable Care Act.

The narrowing of choices and health care services....

So how can numbers coming from the Obama admin be reliable?...

Massachusetts will stop trying to fix its deeply flawed health insurance website and instead buy new software to help its residents enroll in coverage, officials there said Monday. But the state will also prepare to join the federal insurance marketplace by the next enrollment period, which starts in November, in case the new system is not working in time.

The decision follows months of problems with enrollment through the state website, which Massachusetts set up in 2006 under its landmark health insurance law. The site worked well until it was revamped last year to comply with the Affordable Care Act, President Obama’s health care law. The state had put CGI, the company that also helped design the initially problem-plagued federal exchange, in charge of the overhaul.

Massachusetts announced in March that it was dropping CGI, but it is still negotiating the terms of ending its $69 million contract, of which the state has paid $17 million. The state received $174 million from the federal government to overhaul its health insurance website and has spent about $57 million so far, including the amount paid to CGI, according to Glen Shor, the state’s secretary of administration and finance.

Sarah Iselin, a health insurance executive whom Gov. Deval Patrick appointed to oversee fixes to the website, said the new “dual-track” plan would cost a little more than $100 million through 2015. But she said it was too soon to know whether the state would seek more federal money; that will depend partly on whether the state ends up owing CGI more money.

Data provided to the committee by every insurance provider in the health care law’s Federally Facilitated Marketplace (FFM) shows that, as of April 15, 2014, only 67 percent of individuals and families that had selected a health plan in the federally facilitated marketplace had paid their first month’s premium and therefore completed the enrollment process. Nationwide, only 25 percent of paid enrollees are ages 18 to 34.... ...bThe committee has compiled the data that provides a snapshot of the true enrollment picture as of April 15, 2014, after the official end of the open enrollment period. Due to the administration’s repeated and unilateral extensions and changes, as well as the fact that many insurers have reported that individuals will still have time to pay their first month’s premium, the committee plans to ask the insurers in the federally facilitated marketplace to provide an enrollment update by May 20, 2014. On April 17, 2014, President Obama declared the success of his law, claiming that 8 million Americans had signed up for health insurance, but data from the insurance providers reveals that the president’s figure is largely misleading. As of April 15, 2014, insurers informed the committee that only 2.45 million had paid their first month’s premium for coverage obtained through the federally facilitated marketplace. While the administration has relied on questionable nationwide figures to boast the law’s success, the state-by-state breakdown compiled by the committee underscores the serious problems facing some states.

Dramatic changes in questions by Census Bureau makes measuring Obamacare (in)effectiveness more difficult...