Insurance Agents Get Big Compensation Boost to Help Enroll and Renew Millions of Californians, Who Are Benefiting From More Financial Help Than Ever
Agents enroll about half of Covered California’s consumers and have directly helped more than 2.3 million people sign up for coverage free of charge since the exchange first opened its doors in 2014.
The move will bolster independent agents across the state, who provide support to consumers free of charge, as more financial help is available than ever before as open enrollment is underway.
The increased payments will go into effect on Jan. 1, 2022, and will benefit the more than 10,000 Licensed Insurance Agents who are certified by Covered California and work in every part of the state.
Early Childhood Education Workers Highlighted During National Week of Action
New State Program Offers Zero Dollar Health Coverage for Those Who Qualify
This week, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services are spotlighting early childhood education workers during a National Week of Action. Coinciding with that event, Washington Health Benefit Exchange (Exchange) is showcasing a new affordability program, for employees of child care facilities across Washington State. Employees of licensed child care facilities who qualify can receive high quality health care coverage with no monthly premiums. The program is available exclusively through the state’s online health insurance marketplace, Washington Healthplanfinder.
Now that we have two weeks worth of 2022 Open Enrollment data under our belt (well...for 33 states, anyway), I thought this would be a good time for me to try and put together a spitball estimate of how many Americans are likely to enroll in ACA exchange coverage during the 2022 Open Enrollment Period (OEP).
There's really two main numbers to try and project: How many current enrollees will renew/re-enroll for 2022 (whether actively or automatically); and how many new enrollees will jump into the ACA exchanges?
For each of these, due to how the data is reported, I have to further break the states out between those using the federal ACA exchange (HealthCare.Gov) and those which operate their own state-based ACA exchanges (Covered California, NY State of Health, etc.) This is further complicated by the fact that three states (Kentucky, Maine and New Mexico) switched from the federal exchange to their own state-based exchange starting with the 2022 OEP.
In week two of the 2022 Open Enrollment Period, approximately 851,000 people selected individual market plans through the 33 states that use the HealthCare.gov platform. During the Open Enrollment Period, to date, more than 1,624,000 people have selected individual market plans on HealthCare.gov. As in past years, enrollment weeks are measured Sunday through Saturday.
The final number of plan selections associated with enrollment activity during a reporting period may change due to plan modifications or cancellations. In addition, the weekly snapshot only reports new plan selections and active plan renewals and does not report the number of consumers who have paid premiums to effectuate their enrollment.
It's important to remember that unlike most states, Minnesota (and New York) operate Basic Health Plan (BHP) programs (also created by the ACA, although Minnesota's program, called MinnesotaCare, actually existed prior to the ACA and was simply retooled after the law passed). BHP programs fit in between Medicaid expansion (which covers adults earning up to 138% FPL) and standard ACA Qualified Health Plans (QHPs), which start at 200% FPL and above in MN/NY.
As a result, Minnesota & New York ACA enrollees who earn between 138 - 200% FPL are enrolled in MinnesotaCare instead, which significantly reduces the number of Minnesotans officially listed as being "ACA exchange enrollees."
TRENTON — Governor Phil Murphy, Department of Banking and Insurance Commissioner Marlene Caride, federal officials and health insurance Navigators today urged New Jersey residents in need of health coverage to act now to explore their health insurance options and take advantage of record levels of financial help available at Get Covered New Jersey (GetCovered.NJ.gov), the state’s official health insurance marketplace.
Open enrollment is the one time of year residents who do not have health insurance through an employer or other program such as Medicaid or Medicare can enroll in a plan. Consumers must enroll by December 31, 2021 for their coverage to take effect on January 1, 2022.
Six months into the pandemic, the United States continues to suffer the worst outbreak of COVID-19 in the developed world. Considerable blame belongs to a federal response that offloaded responsibility for the crucial task of testing to the states. The irony is that, after assembling the team that came up with an aggressive and ambitious national testing plan, Kushner then appears to have decided, for reasons that remain murky, to scrap its proposal.
DISCLAIMER: HealthSherpa is one of two Enhanced Direct Enrollment (EDE) ACA brokers which run banner ads on my site. EDEs are basically authorized private, 3rd-party versions of ACA exchange sites which have their back ends integrated directly into the federal exchange (HealthCare.Gov) (W3LL is the other EDE which advertises here).
Having said that, I believe Sherpa is the largest ACA EDE out there, and they're pretty transparent about their enrollment metrics, so until CMS posts their official Weekly Snapshot Enrollment Report (which should happen later this week), Sherpa's updates are pretty good indicators of how things are going overall.
Back in early September, I began noticing something very odd going on with my county-level scatter-plot graphs which broke out COVID cases/deaths by what percent of the population had been fully vaccinated:
As you might expect, there's a clear drop-off in new COVID cases per capita as the vaccination rate of the counties goes up. There seems to be a slight drop-off starting around 50% fully vaccinated, followed by a steep drop-off starting around 65% vaxxed. There's a third drop-off at around 75%, but there's literally only a handful of counties which have achieved that high a vaccination rate so far anyway.
HOWEVER, there's one major outlier over the 65% threshold...Miami-Dade County.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, Miami-Dade has fully vaccinated 68% of their entire population (1.84 million out of 2.72 million residents). I use the slightly lower official 2020 U.S. Census popualtion count for Miami-Dade County (2,701,767), which makes the vaccination rate slightly higher still: 68.24%.
I go by FULLY vaccinated residents only (defined as 2 doses of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine or one dose of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine).
I base my percentages on the total population, as opposed to adults only or those over 11 years old (or even over 4 years old).
For most states + DC I use the daily data from the Centers for Disease Control, but there are some where the CDC is either missing county-level data entirely or where the CDC data is less than 90% complete at the county level. Therefore:
For California, I'm using the CDC data for most counties and the state health dept. dashboard data for the 8 small counties which the CDC isn't allowed to post data for.
