Whew! A busy day today indeed...check this out:
Cross-posted at ACA Signups
Well I'll be damned:
When Massachusetts passed its landmark health coverage law under Gov. Mitt Romney in 2006, no one claimed the state would get to zero, as in 0 percent of residents who are uninsured. But numbers out today suggest Massachusetts is very close.
Between December 2013 and March of this year, when the federal government was urging people to enroll, the number of Massachusetts residents signed up for health coverage increased by more than 215,000. If that number holds, the percentage of Massachusetts residents who do not have coverage has dropped to less than 1 percent.
According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, Massachusetts only had around 242,000 uninsured residents out of 6.65 million total as of last September (about 3.6%), just before the ACA exchanges launched. So on the one hand, Massachusetts already had the lowest uninsured rate in the country due, of course, to RomneyCare, the precursor of Obamacare (no matter how much Mitt wants to deny it now, Lord knows why...)
On the other hand, given what a complete disaster the Massachusetts ACA website has been (and continues to be), the "number covered" is a bit on the shaky side, to put it mildly:
Uncertainty might be an understatement. One insurance insider says there is chaos behind the scenes. Most of the new enrollees are in a temporary coverage plan because the state, with its failed website, has not been able to figure out if these people qualify for free or subsidized care.
HOWEVER, that's more of a paperwork issue. The bottom line is that once they finally sort everything out and the dust settles, it looks like the final uninsured rate could end being only a 0.5% or lower:
...Some state officials expect the numbers to hold. That’s because despite a broken website and tons of confusion about deadlines and eligibility, it looks like more than 200,000 residents who did not have health insurance last year pushed to enroll.
...The state may be dropping even closer to zero than the numbers from CHIA indicate. This analysis is based on 167,000 residents in temporary coverage at the end of March. As of today, there are 217,000 in that plan. It’s not clear how many of these people are newly insured. Private health insurers lost at least 10,000 members during the first quarter of this year.
Considering the website embarrassment, just like in Oregon, this is actually quite amazing. It looks very much like in spite of everything, the Affordable Care Act has completed the job that Romney (credit where due, even if he doesn't want it and the GOP is in denial about it) started.