Charles Gaba blew it this time. His projections were, for him, way off:
I was off by about 6% on my HC.gov estimate through the 4th week. On the other hand, this is good news because it means that the actual enrollment total is 126K higher than I thought…and that’s just via Healthcare.Gov…. assuming the 75/25 ratio is accurate, it should mean that instead of the 3.1 million national total I had estimated for 12/12, it should be closer to 3.3 million!
Open enrollment for coverage starting January 1, 2015 is over for Healthcare.gov states. Several states running their own exchanges either added overtime or scheduled a different close-out date. Those dates will close in the netx week. People who attempted to get into Healthcare.gov but could not but called the help desk are being given time to complete their applications. The surge has subsided and the systems fundamentally worked well enough.
Autorenewals will start in the next couple of days for Healthcare.gov states. If people are autorenewed and see a premium that they hate come in the mail, they need to pay the premium for January, but as long as they switch plans by January 15th, their new policy can start on February 1st.
This thing is fundamentally working as designed right now… now we just need the Supreme Court to not fuck it up.
Chopper
A man can dream.
sparrow
Thanks for the info about changing plans. My mom is buying a plan on the exchange in Oklahoma for the second year now. She’s 63, so the plan isn’t too cheap (cheapest bronze is about $470, a hike of $70 from last year). But it seems the subsidy (as I recall about $180 last year) is also going up for them so not a big deal. They were one of the people who waited to the last minute on the 15th so they’re going to be stuck on auto-renew and I’ll see if I can’t find them a better plan when I come down for Christmas. However this is Oklahoma, so there aren’t too many plans being offered.
I told my parents (semi-sane, but very poorly informed republicans) that they’re conservative friends on the supreme court might blow up their subsidy, and they were not happy about it. They then hinted them might want to move out by me in Maryland, and I basically said “hell no if you’re going to vote republican”, to which they laughed. But I was serious! sigh…
Dcrefugee
Even after it was “fixed,” I had nothing but trouble with the HC.gov site, ending up being one of the “orphans” who got grandfathered past the last deadline (March 2014?). I had insurance, which I’ve since let lapse, so I wanted to get signed up during this open enrollment period. Alas…
I’d checked the site a couple of times since March, mainly to look at options. Everything worked. But when I tried to sign on a couple of weeks ago, the system wouldn’t accept my password. I went through the reset procedures, but even they wouldn’t work. Ended up calling the 800 number and getting a tech to fix it. No word on what was the problem. That was a couple of hours out of my life, including an hour or so on the phone.
I went through the 20-questions portion, which I had done before. Got to the end and the system said it was trying to verify my identity. All my info was correct and hadn’t changed since early 2014, but it still couldn’t ID me, even though I previously gotten well past this stage.
Since I really wanted to get some coverage for 2015, I bit the bullet Sunday morning and called again. Spent an hour waiting on a human, who was very new at the job — still reading basic support scripts seemingly for the first time. Spent at least another 30 minutes walking through stuff — I mainly was on hold as the rep sought assistance from others — before I was told there was nothing they could do and I would have to wait for the system to verify my ID.
No can do, I told them, thanks to Monday’s deadline. The rep agreed to try a couple of things and we managed to get it done. Finally. Signed up for a plan yesterday.
But the HC.gov site still has issues, and there’s no higher level of tech support available, I’m told, despite having asked for it repeatedly. YMMV…
TaMara (BHF)
Thanks for the reminder. I had pulled my Jan payment (autopay) thinking I was switching insurance plans. Little did I know. That extra month will give me the time I need to assess what I can and see if I can make the best of a very bad health care insurance plan situation.
SFAW
Would you also like a pony with that fantasy?
wvng
@Dcrefugee: I’m really sorry you had all those problems. My experience was the opposite. It remembered us, had all the information correct, had no trouble entering new income information, had no trouble signing up for a new plan after reviewing my options.
Richard Mayhew
@SFAW: My fantasies have things other than ponies in them
Green balloons for instance
etc.
I am tasked with designing a plan for my workplace. I am completely at sea. If anyone could point me in the right direction for finding help in this matter, I would be grateful.
Thanks
Three-nineteen
@Dcrefugee: The website never worked for me either. It still doesn’t believe I’m me, so I don’t have an account. I can see all the plan options without an account though, so I looked through the website, picked the plan I wanted, and called in. The call took less than 10 minutes, and I’m all signed up for next year.
Raven on the Hill
Could you do a piece on the likely consequences of a bad Court decision in Halbig? (Maybe more later, on signing up for an off-Exchange plan. Do Not Trust Velapoint.)
Jack the Second
It’s OK, if the Supreme Court says that the Act doesn’t say what it says, because otherwise the less poor people might get the health insurance they previously denied to the fairly poor people, then the new Congress can just pass a quick, easy bill to fix it.
burnspbesq
Has any journalist or blogger actually asked Jonathan Adler how he feels about the possibility that hundreds of thousands of his fellow Americans may die as the direct and proximate result of his pursuit of a crackpot theory of statutory construction?