uncancels – The Health Care Blog

Obamacare Enrollment Hits Six Million. Is Seven Million Out of Reach?

Dec 1, 2019

By THCBist

The Obama administration announced Thursday that Obamacare enrollment has hit 6 million thanks to a last minute surge in visits to Healthcare.gov. The White House said Healthcare.gov recorded 450,000 visits on Wednesday and logged 430,000 call center calls. Acknowledging a rocky start to enrollment, the Congressional Budget Office revised the original goal of 7 million Obamacare signups downward to 6 million earlier this year.

On Tuesday the administration did something that some supporters had been urging for months, announcing it will give a break to visitors who say they’ve tried to sign up but were unable to. Would be Obamacare enrollees will have until mid-April (April 15) to complete the sign up process, making it possible – if not highly probable- that by the end of the day, once all the numbers have been counted, the 7 million milestone will be reached and the administration will be able to declare itself a victory .

If you’re one of the people who just woke up, rolled out of bed and decided to go buy yourself a health insurance policy this weekend, you’ll want to scuttle over to Healthcare.gov and begin the enrollment process soon to be sure that you qualify for an extension. Note that logging on to the Healthcare.gov and entering your name address and other personal details is not enough – you’ll need to certify that you actually do intend to buy insurance (and yes, you really do mean it this time) by clicking a little checkbox on the application, which makes it all official. It is doubtful that anybody will count the number of people who thought they clicked the little box but didn’t, so make sure that you actually click on it not near it or next to it.

So how many people will have signed up for Obamacare by the March 31st deadline? The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that 100K QHPs a day signed up on Monday and Tuesday. (For the uninitiated, QHP stands for qualified health plan, meaning a plan that .) if you’re keeping score at home, the official QHP count during the Healthcare.gov meltdown in October was an anemic 106,000 signups – a tally which many observers believe was inflated. 100K

What does that mean? Well, it probably doesn’t mean very much. Although people will be talking about the number. The real action is yet to come when people start showing up at their doctors offices and attempt to use their. The sequel .

Then again, some critics question the validity of the official totals, arguing that a Healthcare.gov signup does not necessarily equal a signup in the real world, meaning will likely be debating exactly how many people have signed up for Obamacare for months, if not years.

Pre-Exs: The real number we should talking about (but largely aren’t) is the number of people who’ve signed up for insurance under Obamacare who would have been unable to buy insurance under the old, evil healthcare system that discriminated against people with previously existing conditions like cancer, high blood pressure and HIV/AIDS. How many people have been able to get coverage? We have no idea. And the people who do have an idea – the insurance companies who kept totals of the number of people they turned away – aren’t talking about it very much, for obvious reasons.

Cancels: The number of people who had their insurance plans cancelled by the insurers on the grounds that they did not meet the standards of the Affordable Care Act. Being a cancel can be considered a badge of honor in the gamification of the healthcare system that is Healthcare.gov.

Uncancels: The number of people who had their plans cancelled by the health insurers only to have them declared “uncancelled” by the Obama administration or their state government. Nobody really knows how many uncancels there are. Don’t ask. Yes, it will take a really long time to sort out the uncancels from the cancels and the QHPs. And you will probably want to shoot the person explaining it to you.

Numbers We’d Rather Be Talking About

Mar 29, 2014• 11

By JOHN IRVINE

You’ll be hearing a lot about the number six point five million over the next few days.

Six point five million — or whatever the exact number turns out to be at the end of the day — being the number of people that the administration say signed up for Obamacare through the exchanges when open enrollment ends March 31st.

How meaningful the official numbers are will be open to debate. The bloviation factor will be in full effect. The critics will be downplaying the administration’s number, ACA supporters defending it. Data geeks-turned-media stars will explain what it all means.

Here’s a guide to some of the other numbers we should be talking about as we try to make sense of what’s really going on and what really happened during the Obamacare rollout.

FUDs: The number of people who are innocently living their lives thinking they have bought health insurance, but who, for one reason or another, be it technical glitch, bureaucratic incompetence or technicality – are going to wake up one morning not long from now and discover that they do not have health insurance.

And who one day soon will discover that they do not have health insurance. This is the group that causes people in Washington to lie awake at night; because they are going to complain – and complain loudly. While the talk from the administration to this point has been all tough, it seems logical to assume it will build an appeal mechanism that will allow FUDs back into the system. The early signs are that this is the case.

404s : The number of people / applications lost in the system, either as a result of the Healthcare.gov fiasco or because their application is sitting forgotten on somebody’s desk somewhere or on a laptop. Anybody who tried to log into Healthcare.gov at the height of the meltdown or who has gone back and forth with their insurance company over a bill gets it.

It is safe to assume that this is another number that keeps planners up at night. Let’s just say it is safe to assume that there are a lot of 404s.

CANCELS: The number of people who had their insurance plans cancelled by insurers on the grounds that they did not meet the standards set by the Affordable Care Act. In a way, being a cancel can be considered a badge of honor in the gamification of the healthcare system that is Obamacare.

UNCANCELS: The number of people who had their plans cancelled by the health insurers only to have them declared “uncancelled” by the Obama administration or their state. Nobody really knows how many uncancels there are. Don’t ask. Yes, it will take a really long time to sort out the uncancels from the cancels and the QHPs.

And you will probably want to shoot the person explaining it to you. In the gamification of the healthcare system, level ups go to people who have been cancelled, uncancelled and bumped.

BUMPS: The number of people who have been “bumped” out of network and are being forced to change doctors. What’s going on? In gamification terms, bumps make things more exciting. In real life, they suck. Getting bumped off a flight is annoying, getting bumped in the health care system is potentially life-threatening.

LIVES SAVED: As we speak Nate Silver or a smart person who looks and sounds a lot like Nate Silver is sitting at a computer in a darkened room somewhere trying to come up with a reliable quantification of the number of lives the Affordable Care Act has saved and will save by shielding people from the barbaric US healthcare system.

How would you go about coming up with that number? Would you look at people turned away from emergency rooms? Would you look at the number of preventable deaths under the old system? Would you total the number of deaths from cancer, heart attack and stroke? Compare mortality rates over the decade from 2004-2014 with those from 2014-2024? It will be long time before we have the data we need to really understand how well we’ve done.

You can forget the nonsense we’ve been hearing about Obamacare costing the lives of thousands of Americans by taking their health coverage away from them. There is a difference between losing your coverage temporarily because the system is in transition and losing it and knowing that you’ll never be able to get it back. Ever.

Calculated over decades to come the number of lives saved is likely to total in the thousands, if not the millions. And that will be the true test of the Affordable Care Act as a historical accomplishment for Barak Obama and his administration.