Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell
This is from Beverly Gossage, president of HSA Benefits Consulting and a candidate for Insurance Commissioner in Kansas:
The data on which of the enrolled was previously uninsured is readily available. I am certified to write policies on and off the exchange and can tell you the application itself asked these questions:
1) Have you been insured in the past 12 months?
2) When did your insurance terminate?
An applicant cannot progress through the application without answering. Of course, we won’t know if they lied on the application, but it would give us a reasonable percentage.
The majority of the agents/brokers to whom I spoke reported that the majority of those they assisted were insured but were
1) bounced from their previous plan either by the carrier or employer
2) realized they could get a subsidy when their previous plan’s premium was increased.
When I asked an executive friend at Coventry last week why they don’t release the percentage of the uninsured who enrolled, he told me that HHS hadn’t authorized them to do so. He was not willing to go on record with that.
They also know precisely how many bills they have mailed out and how many policies are current on payments.
However, HHS will play dumb the rest of the year claiming there is no way to get that information.
Dont’ you love all this transparency?
This shows that it wasn’t that people didn’t have insurance, it was that people that couldn’t afford the coverage. And now that the prices are going to increase, there is not much hope that people are going to get coverage. The system is flawed and Obamacare only made it more flawed.
Not only that, but they have also created more barriers for enrollees to sign up.
“Of course, we won’t know if they lied on the application, but it would give us a reasonable percentage.”
And of course relying on people for honesty.
“it was that people that couldn’t afford the coverage”
Or were bounced from their coverage.
So is it just a trap? If the information is there, what is the point of questions that halt the progress of the application.
Sounds to me like more government trickery to fool its citizens.
The point of the questions is that people are going to be hit with the Obamacare tax if they haven’t kept up creditable coverage. (Typically you can’t go more than 62 days without it but I don’t know what they Obamacare time frame is.) And so — of course — the answer to this question has always been available
“…he told me that HHS hadn’t authorized them to do so. He was not willing to go on record with that.”
I wonder what is the deal with the cover up? The HHS is just making things harder than they need to be.
When I asked an executive friend at Coventry last week why they don’t release the percentage of the uninsured who enrolled, he told me that HHS hadn’t authorized them to do so.
I wonder if HHS specifically told them NOT to release that information?
The most likely of scenarios.
The Gallup/Healthways polls tell us that there was a big spike in uninsured in the last quarter of 2013. This is still unexplained. I think the most plausible explanation is that they were cancelled or decided to drop coverage because they knew they were going into Obamacare.
Obviously, someone who was insured a few days or weeks or months ago, and then gets Obamacare coverage, was not “uninsured” in the same sense that someone who lost his job in the post-2008 recession was “uninsured”.
We can’t really make useful comments on how many Obamacare sign-ups were uninsured until we know the distribution of the period of insurance for the group.