Tag Archives: Uninsured

Following the ACA Repeal-and-Replace Effort, Where Does the U.S. Stand on Insurance Coverage?

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http://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2017/sep/post-aca-repeal-and-replace-health-insurance-coverage

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Conclusion and Policy Implications

The findings of this study could inform both short- and long-term actions for policymakers seeking to improve the affordability of marketplace plans and reduce the number of uninsured people in the United States.

Short-Term

The most immediate concern for policymakers is ensuring that the 17 million to 18 million people with marketplace and individual market coverage are able to enroll this fall.

Congress could take the following three steps:

  1. The Trump administration has not made a long-term commitment to paying insurers for the cost-sharing reductions for low-income enrollees in the marketplaces, which insurers are required to offer under the ACA. Congress could resolve this by making a permanent appropriation for the payments. Without this commitment, insurers have already announced that they are increasing premiums to hedge against the risk of not receiving payments from the federal government. Since most enrollees receive tax credits, higher premiums also will increase the federal government’s costs.9
  2. While it appears that most counties will have at least one insurer offering plans in the marketplaces this year, Congress could consider a fallback health plan option to protect consumers if they do not have a plan to choose from, with subsidies available to help qualifying enrollees pay premiums.
  3. Reinsurance to help carriers cover unexpectedly high claims costs.10 During the three years in which it was functioning, the ACA’s transitional reinsurance program lowered premiums by as much as 14 percent.

The executive branch can also play an important role in two ways:

  1. Signaling to insurers participating in the marketplaces that it will enforce the individual mandate. Uncertainty over the administration’s commitment to the mandate, like the cost-sharing reductions, is leading to higher-than-expected premiums for next year.
  2. Affirming the commitment to ensuring that all eligible Americans are aware of their options and have the tools they need to enroll in the coverage that is right for them during the 2018 open enrollment period, which begins November 1. The survey findings indicate that large shares of uninsured Americans are unaware of the marketplaces and that enrollment assistance makes a difference in whether people sign up for insurance.

Long-Term

The following longer-term policy changes will likely lead to affordability improvement and reductions in the number of uninsured people.

  1. The 19 states that have not expanded Medicaid could decide to do so.
  2. Alleviate affordability issues for people with incomes above 250 percent of poverty by:
    1. Allowing people earning more than 400 percent of poverty to be eligible for tax credits. This would cover an estimated 1.2 million people at an annual total federal cost of $6 billion, according to a RAND analysis.11
    2. Increasing tax credits for people with incomes above 250 percent of poverty.
    3. Allowing premium contributions to be fully tax deductible for people buying insurance on their own; self-employed people have long been able to do this.
    4. Extending cost-sharing reductions for individuals with incomes above 250 percent of poverty, thus making care more affordable for insured individuals with moderate incomes.
  3. Consider immigration reform and expanding insurance options for undocumented immigrants.

In 2002, the Institute of Medicine concluded that insurance coverage is the most important determinant of access to health care.12 In the ongoing public debate over how to provide insurance to people, the conversation often drifts from this fundamental why of health insurance. At this pivotal moment, more than 30 million people now rely on the ACA’s reforms and expansions. Nearly 30 million more are uninsured — because of the reasons identified in this survey. It is critical that the health of these 60 million people, along with their ability to lead long and productive lives, be the central focus in our debate over how to improve the U.S. health insurance system, regardless of the approach ultimately chosen.

How Would Coverage, Federal Spending, and Private Premiums Change if the Federal Government Stopped Reimbursing Insurers for the ACA’s Cost-Sharing Reductions?

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http://www.rwjf.org/en/library/research/2017/09/how-would-coverage-federal-spending-and-private-premiums-change.html

http://www.rwjf.org/content/dam/farm/reports/issue_briefs/2017/rwjf440003

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Elimination of federal cost-sharing reductions could increase marketplace spending by 18 percent or increase the uninsured by 9.4 million, depending on insurer response.

The Issue

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) requires insurers to provide cost-sharing reductions (CSRs) that lower deductibles, co-payments, co-insurance, and out-of-pocket maximums for people eligible for tax credits and with incomes below 250 percent of the federal poverty level. With current policy uncertainty surrounding these CSRs, there are multiple future scenarios, but all involve increases in insurance premiums for consumers and there is a potential for large reductions in the insured population.

Key Findings

The report analyzes three potential scenarios and outcomes:

  • Insurers have enough time before the start of the plan year to incorporate their anticipated CSR costs into a surcharge placed on silver plan premiums.
  • Insurers exit the marketplaces in response to the loss of CSRs and other policy uncertainties and changes.
  • The federal government does not reimburse insurers for CSRs and lawmakers alter the ACA so that insurers are no longer required to pay CSRs to eligible enrollees.
Conclusion

In 2018, the number of uninsured Americans could increase by 9.4 million, and average premiums could increase by nearly 37 percent, if insurers abandon the marketplaces because of a decision to eliminate federal reimbursement of health insurance CSRs.

 

About the Urban Institute

The nonprofit Urban Institute is dedicated to elevating the debate on social and economic policy. For nearly five decades, Urban scholars have conducted research and offered evidence-based solutions that improve lives and strengthen communities across a rapidly urbanizing world. Their objective research helps expand opportunities for all, reduce hardship among the most vulnerable, and strengthen the effectiveness of the public sector. Visit the Urban Institute’s Health Policy Center for more information specific to its staff and its recent research.

Why We Need Medicare for All

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This is a pivotal moment in American history. Do we, as a nation, join the rest of the industrialized world and guarantee comprehensive health care to every person as a human right? Or do we maintain a system that is enormously expensive, wasteful and bureaucratic, and is designed to maximize profits for big insurance companies, the pharmaceutical industry, Wall Street and medical equipment suppliers?

We remain the only major country on earth that allows chief executives and stockholders in the health care industry to get incredibly rich, while tens of millions of people suffer because they can’t get the health care they need. This is not what the United States should be about.

All over this country, I have heard from Americans who have shared heartbreaking stories about our dysfunctional system. Doctors have told me about patients who died because they put off their medical visits until it was too late. These were people who had no insurance or could not afford out-of-pocket costs imposed by their insurance plans.

I have heard from older people who have been forced to split their pills in half because they couldn’t pay the outrageously high price of prescription drugs. Oncologists have told me about cancer patients who have been unable to acquire lifesaving treatments because they could not afford them. This should not be happening in the world’s wealthiest country.

Americans should not hesitate about going to the doctor because they do not have enough money. They should not worry that a hospital stay will bankrupt them or leave them deeply in debt. They should be able to go to the doctor they want, not just one in a particular network. They should not have to spend huge amounts of time filling out complicated forms and arguing with insurance companies as to whether or not they have the coverage they expected.

Even though 28 million Americans remain uninsured and even more are underinsured, we spend far more per capita on health care than any other industrialized nation. In 2015, the United States spent almost $10,000 per person for health care; the Canadians, Germans, French and British spent less than half of that, while guaranteeing health care to everyone. Further, these countries have higher life expectancy rates and lower infant mortality rates than we do.

The reason that our health care system is so outrageously expensive is that it is not designed to provide quality care to all in a cost-effective way, but to provide huge profits to the medical-industrial complex. Layers of bureaucracy associated with the administration of hundreds of individual and complicated insurance plans is stunningly wasteful, costing us hundreds of billions of dollars a year. As the only major country not to negotiate drug prices with the pharmaceutical industry, we spend tens of billions more than we should.

The solution to this crisis is not hard to understand. A half-century ago, the United States established Medicare. Guaranteeing comprehensive health benefits to Americans over 65 has proved to be enormously successful, cost-effective and popular. Now is the time to expand and improve Medicare to cover all Americans.

This is not a radical idea. I live 50 miles south of the Canadian border. For decades, every man, woman and child in Canada has been guaranteed health care through a single-payer, publicly funded health care program. This system has not only improved the lives of the Canadian people but has also saved families and businesses an immense amount of money.

On Wednesday I will introduce the Medicare for All Act in the Senate with 15 co-sponsors and support from dozens of grass-roots organizations. Under this legislation, every family in America would receive comprehensive coverage, and middle-class families would save thousands of dollars a year by eliminating their private insurance costs as we move to a publicly funded program.

The transition to the Medicare for All program would take place over four years. In the first year, benefits to older people would be expanded to include dental care, vision coverage and hearing aids, and the eligibility age for Medicare would be lowered to 55. All children under the age of 18 would also be covered. In the second year, the eligibility age would be lowered to 45 and in the third year to 35. By the fourth year, every man, woman and child in the country would be covered by Medicare for All.

Needless to say, there will be huge opposition to this legislation from the powerful special interests that profit from the current wasteful system. The insurance companies, the drug companies and Wall Street will undoubtedly devote a lot of money to lobbying, campaign contributions and television ads to defeat this proposal. But they are on the wrong side of history.

Guaranteeing health care as a right is important to the American people not just from a moral and financial perspective; it also happens to be what the majority of the American people want. According to an April poll by The Economist/YouGov, 60 percent of the American people want to “expand Medicare to provide health insurance to every American,” including 75 percent of Democrats, 58 percent of independents and 46 percent of Republicans.

Now is the time for Congress to stand with the American people and take on the special interests that dominate health care in the United States. Now is the time to extend Medicare to everyone.

Uninsured Rate In U.S. Falls To A Record Low Of 8.8%

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Uninsured Rate In U.S. Falls To A Record Low Of 8.8%

Three years after the Affordable Care Act’s coverage expansion took effect, the number of Americans without health insurance fell to 28.1 million in 2016, down from 29 million in 2015, according to a federal report released Tuesday.

The latest numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau showed the nation’s uninsured rate dropped to 8.8 percent. It had been 9.1 percent in 2015.

Both the overall number of uninsured and the percentage are record lows.

The uninsured rate has fallen in all 50 states and the District of Columbia since 2013, although the rate has been lower among the 31 states that expanded Medicaid under the health law. California’s rate was 7.3 percent in 2016, less than half of its 17.2 percent rate in 2013.

“California has shown that the Affordable Care Act is working to expand health coverage and provide new patient protections,” said Anthony Wright, executive director of Health Access California, a consumer advocacy group. “While many thought our nation’s rising uninsured rate was unsolvable, the advancement in California shows that if policymakers and the public are united in trying to make reform work, we can do big things.”

The latest figures from the Census Bureau effectively close the book on President Barack Obama’s record on lowering the number of uninsured. He made that a linchpin of his 2008 campaign, and his administration’s effort to overhaul the nation’s health system through the ACA focused on expanding coverage.

When Obama took office in 2009, during the worst economic recession since the Great Depression, more than 50 million Americans were uninsured, or nearly 17 percent of the population.

The number of uninsured has fallen from 42 million in 2013 — before the ACA in 2014 allowed states to expand Medicaid, the federal-state program that provides coverage to low-income people, and provided federal subsidies to help lower- and middle-income Americans buy coverage on the insurance marketplaces. The decline also reflected the improving economy, which has put more Americans in jobs that offer health coverage.

The dramatic drop in the uninsured over the past few years played a major role in the congressional debate over the summer about whether to replace the 2010 health law. Advocates pleaded with the Republican-controlled Congress not to take steps to reverse the gains in coverage.

The Census numbers are considered the gold standard for tracking who has insurance because the survey samples are so large.

Among the states, the lowest uninsured rate last year was 2.5 percent in Massachusetts and the highest was 16.6 percent in Texas, the Census Bureau said. States that expanded Medicaid had an average uninsured rate of 6.5 percent compared with an 11.7 percent average among states that did not expand, the Census Bureau reported.

More than half of Americans — 55.7 percent — get health insurance through their jobs. But government coverage is becoming more common. Medicaid now covers more than 19 percent of the population and Medicare nearly 17 percent.

Healthcare Triage News: Congress is Back, and Healthcare Should Be on the To-do List

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Healthcare Triage News: Congress is Back, and Healthcare Should Be on the To-do List

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Congress is back in session, and it has a full month ahead. They have to deal with hurricanes, raise the debt limit, fund the government, keep us out of war, AND they want to talk about cutting taxes, too. With all this going on, it’s going to be hard to get anything done around healthcare, but there’s lots that needs to be done.

There’s one Obamacare repeal bill left standing. Here’s what’s in it.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/politics/cassidy-graham-explainer/?utm_term=.c90e0ce41aa2

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After a dramatic series of failed Senate votes in July, there’s one repeal-and-replace plan for the Affordable Care Act left standing. Trump is pushing for a vote, per Politico, and John McCain has announced his support, but the bill has yet to gain significant traction.

The proposal, crafted by Sens. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) and Dean Heller (R-Nev.), essentially turns control of the health-care markets over to the states. Rather than funding Medicaid and subsidies directly, that money would be put into a block grant that a state could use to develop any health-care system it wants. It also allows states to opt out of many ACA regulations. “If you like Obamacare, you can keep it,” Graham has said, using a common nickname for the health-care law. “If you want to replace it, you can.”

In reality, that may not be true. The Medicaid expansion and subsidy funding would be cut sharply compared to current spending, going to zero in a decade.

 “You can’t actually keep the same program if your federal funding is being cut by a third in 2026,” said Aviva Aron-Dine, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. And even putting aside the cuts, she said, the block grant structure would fundamentally change the health-care landscape. “[Funding] is capped, so it wouldn’t  go up and down with the economy,” when fewer or more people become eligible for subsidies.

Republicans contest this. The drop in funding “gives strong incentives for the states to be more efficient with their program,” said Ed Haislmaier, a senior fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation. That is, states may be able to maintain the ACA structure and regulations as long as they streamline operations.

If the streamlining turns out to be insufficient, the cuts would hit liberal states the hardest, according to a report by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. This is largely because they tend to be the biggest spenders on health care: They’ve expanded Medicaid and aggressively signed people up for marketplace coverage. They have the most to lose.

 On the whole, Aron-Dine says, “This is a lot more similar to the [Senate repeal bill] than different. All of them end with devastating cuts to marketplace subsidies, Medicaid, and weakening of consumer protections.”

Haislmaier agreed, pointing out the Cassidy-Graham plan was originally intended as an amendment to the Senate bill.

Here’s the nitty gritty of what would change, compared to the ACA and the Senate plan that failed in July:

Who would need to be covered

Under the Cassidy-Graham plan, the mandates would be eliminated at the federal level. States could choose to keep the measure, replace it or get rid of it completely.

How they would pay for coverage

The federal health insurance subsidies that help most people with ACA marketplace plans afford their coverage would change. This bill would shift those subsidies to the state-level, so people in some states may see their subsidy scaled back or eliminated.

Proposed changes to Medicaid

The bill would restructure Medicaid and decrease its funding. That would make it very difficult for states to maintain the Medicaid expansion.

 

Trump wants one last Senate push on Obamacare repeal

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http://www.politico.com/story/2017/09/05/trump-obamacare-repeal-senate-242346

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The odds are slim, but the White House still hopes for action on a bill drafted by Lindsey Graham and Bill Cassidy.

President Donald Trump and some Senate Republicans are refusing to give up on Obamacare repeal, even after this summer’s spectacular failure and with less than a month before a key deadline.

The president and White House staff have continued to work with Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolijna and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana over the summer on their proposal to block grant federal health care funding to the states. And though the bill is being rewritten and Congress faces a brutal September agenda, Trump and his allies on health care are making a last-gasp effort.

“He wants to do it, the president does. He loves the block grants. But we’ve got to have political support outside Washington,” Graham said in an interview. He said the bill needs to have a “majority of the Republican governors behind the idea” to gain momentum in the Senate.

But there’s far more work to do even than that. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell would need to find room on the packed calendar this month to hold another uncertain push to repeal Obamacare on party lines. The Senate has only until the end of the month to pass the measure using powerful budget reconciliation procedures, but is also planning to fund the government, raise the debt ceiling, write a new defense policy bill and extend a host of expiring programs.

Cassidy said he hopes to have the bill text finalized by this week and has declined to reveal details about what changed in the bill during August.

“We are still refining the legislative language — just things you got to clear up,” he said. “We think we have good legislation, good policy.”

The Congressional Budget Office would also still need time to analyze the cost of the bill, a process that could take several weeks.

Trump berated McConnell and the Senate GOP over the summer for falling one vote short of sending repeal into conference with the House in July, when Sen. John McCain of Arizona voted down the GOP’s “skinny” repeal bill. So the White House has continued to work on the Graham-Cassidy bill behind the scenes, seeing it as the best option to make progress, according to several administration officials.

The bill would keep most of Obamacare’s taxes and devolve many spending decisions to the states. It was submitted as an amendment to the repeal bill in July but did not receive a vote; aides say it could not pass the Senate in its current form.

Trump has intermittently told aides he wants progress on health care and is still frustrated that the bill failed. The White House’s legislative team has talked with Republican governors in recent weeks and is planning to bring more to the White House, according to one of the officials. Internally, White House officials say they have listened to concerns from governors and tried to tweak the state block grant formulas.

Hill leadership hasn’t played a central role in the effort.

McConnell said in Kentucky last month that the path forward is “somewhat murky” and pointed to efforts by Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) to stabilize insurance markets as one avenue forward, though he doubted Democrats’ resolve on the bipartisan effort.

“We’re going to see what Sen. Alexander and his team can do on a bipartisan basis. The Democrats have been pretty uninterested in any reforms. They’re really interested in sending money to insurance companies but not very interested in reforms,” McConnell said then.

Inside the White House, there is little hope that a health care bill can happen quickly, with a stacked legislative agenda. And some close to the president prefer he would focus on tax reform and other immediate fiscal issues.

The Senate parliamentarian has ruled that the chamber’s reconciliation instructions, which allow the GOP to evade a Democratic filibuster and the chamber’s 60-vote requirement, expire at the end of the month. Republicans are planning to use their next budget measure to pass tax reform via a simple majority. But Graham insisted there’s a short window to fulfill the party’s seven-year promise if the GOP goes into overdrive, starting this week.

“It’s possible, yes. But you’ve got to do it quickly … introduce it this week, have a hearing soon about the bill, then the process is set to actually take it to floor and vote,” Graham said. “Everything has to fall in place.”

State officials plead for bipartisan ObamaCare fix

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State officials plead for bipartisan ObamaCare fix

State officials plead for bipartisan ObamaCare fix

State insurance officials pleaded with senators on Wednesday to quickly act to stabilize the ObamaCare markets, calling for a multiyear extension of key payments to help fund premiums for low-income customers.

Congress must pass a fix by the end of September to shore up the wobbly individual markets, several officials said, in particular funding for key ObamaCare insurer payments known as cost-sharing reductions (CSR).

“The CSR funding issue is the single most critical issue that you can address to help stabilize insurance markets for 2018 and potentially bring down costs,” Tennessee’s insurance commissioner Julie Mix McPeak told the Senate Health Committee.

The panel kicked off a series of hearings Wednesday on stabilizing the markets. If Congress can pass a bill, it would represent the biggest bipartisan update since President Obama signed the law in 2010.

Health committee Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) wants to find consensus by the end of next week. To sell the fix, he and ranking member Patty Murray (D-Wash.) held a private meeting with senators not on the committee and the witnesses who testified as Wednesday’s hearing.

“If we can do two things, that would be two more things that we have agreed on in a bipartisan way in the last seven years in health insurance,” Alexander told reporters.

“And then let the leaders see if we can pass it, and hope the House does and that the president signs it.”

Despite some pushback that could still come from conservatives calling the payments an “insurer bailout,” Alexander and Murray hope to cobble together a bipartisan group that agree some continuation of the payments is necessary.

The cost sharing subsidies, which reimburse insurers for giving discounted deductibles and co-pays to low-income customers, have been made by the Trump administration on a month-to-month basis.

Republicans had sued the Obama administration over the payments, calling them unconstitutional, but many have since acknowledged they need to continue at least in the near term to prevent steep premium hikes.

Insurers have asked for long-term certainty on the payments, threatening to hike premiums and leave the ObamaCare markets altogether if they don’t get it.

Democrats, and some Republicans like Alexander, agree Congress should fund the payments, but there’s disagreement on the time frame.

Alexander wants to fund the payments through 2018 while Murray has pushed for multiple years.

“It is critical that we work toward a multiyear solution in order to provide the kind of certainty that will have the most impact on families’ premiums and choices in the marketplaces,” Murray said.

America’s Health Insurance Plans, the nation’s largest insurer trade association, and other stakeholder groups urged Congress to fund the payments through at least 2019.

“Without two years of CSR funding, uncertainty will persist and the Congress will need to address these same issues early next year,” the groups wrote in a letter to the committee Tuesday.

Meanwhile, Republicans say a bipartisan health bill must include changes to ObamaCare’s state waivers so states have more control over what their insurance plans look like.

Alexander said ObamaCare’s waivers should be amended so “states can have more flexibility to devise ways to provide more coverage with more choices and lower costs.”

“It just hasn’t been very appealing to states because it is a difficult tool to use,” he said.

This point was echoed by Pennsylvania’s insurance commissioner Theresa Miller, who called the process to get approved cumbersome.

“Baseline coverage requirements should be kept intact as much as possible … but make it easier for states to respond to market issues,” she said.

For example, it takes at least six months to get a waiver approved with the federal government, which the commissioners said made it difficult to quickly respond to market issues.

But Democrats have been wary of anything they say could result in coverage losses and the availability of less comprehensive insurance plans.

The Senate GOP’s ObamaCare repeal plan, which failed in a dramatic vote with Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) joining two other Republicans in opposition, contained language intended to make it easier for states to approve less comprehensive plans.

However, Democrats say that is going in the wrong direction.

We should be “moving forward not backward on affordability, coverage and quality of care,” Murray said.

“We’re all well aware threading this needle won’t be easy,” she said, “but I do believe an agreement that protects patients and families from higher costs and uncertainty, and maintains the guardrails in our current health care system, is possible.”

Several commissioners also recommended setting up a temporary reinsurance program to help insurers with high cost patients with the intent of lowering premiums for healthier ones.

“Congress should enact a federal reinsurance program with a minimum duration of three years,” said Washington state insurance commissioner Mike Kreidler, adding that it would “significantly help stabilize the individual health insurance market.”

But Alexander indicated it’s unlikely for the bill to include reinsurance funding, noting that the U.S. is already trillions in debt.

“If a reinsurance program is such a good idea … why don’t states do it?” he asked, suggesting states impose small fees on every insurance plan sold to help fund it.

Democrats are also pushing for a bill to restore ObamaCare outreach funding after the Trump administration announced drastic cuts to the program.

Alaska’s insurance director Lori Wing-Heier said the cuts concern her because “these programs reduce the number of uninsured citizens and maximize public participation.”

Advertising cutbacks reduce Marketplace information-seeking behavior: Lessons from Kentucky for 2018

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Advertising cutbacks reduce Marketplace information-seeking behavior: Lessons from Kentucky for 2018

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The Trump administration announced Thursday that it was cutting spending on advertisingfor the 2018 Marketplace open enrollment period from $100 to $10 million. Empirical work can inform our expectations for its impact, assuming these cuts are implemented. We already know that higher exposure to advertising has been associated with perceptions of feeling more informed about the ACA and counties with more television advertising saw larger decreases in the uninsured rate during the 2014 open enrollment period.

Kentucky— an early success story under the ACA—sponsored a robust multimedia campaign to create awareness about its state-based marketplace, known as kynect, to educate its residents about the opportunity to gain coverage. However, after the 2015 gubernatorial election, the Bevin administration declined to renew the advertising contract for kynect and directed all pending advertisements to be canceled with approximately six weeks remaining in the 2016 open enrollment period. The reduction in advertising during open enrollment gives us precisely the rare leverage needed to assess the influence of advertising using real-world data.

We obtained advertising and Marketplace data in Kentucky to identify whether a dose-response relationship exists between weekly advertising volume and information-seeking behavior. Television advertising data for Kentucky were obtained from Kantar Media/CMAG through the Wesleyan Media Project. These data provide tracking of individual ad airings, including date, time, sponsor, station, and media market. We used a population-weighted average to create a state-level count of kynect ads shown per week. Our outcome measures were related to information-seeking behavior—phone calls to the marketplace and metrics related to engagement on the kynect website—and came from the Office of the Kentucky Health Benefit Exchange via public records request. We used multivariable linear regression models to identify variation in each outcome attributable to kynect advertising and estimated marginal effects to identify the influence of advertising during open enrollment.

State-sponsored advertising for kynect fell from an average of 58.8 and 52.3 ads per week during the 2014 and 2015 open enrollment periods to 19.4 during the first nine weeks of the 2016 open enrollment period and none during the final four weeks. We found that advertising volume was strongly associated with information-seeking behavior through the kynect web site (see Figure 1). Each additional kynect ad per week during open enrollment was associated with an additional 7,973 page views (P=.001), 390 visits (P=.003), and 388 unique visitors (P<.001) to the kynect web site per week. Based on the average number of ads per week during the first two open enrollment periods, our estimates imply that there would have been more than 450,000 fewer page views, 20,000 fewer visits, and 20,000 fewer unique visitors per week during open enrollment without the television campaign. Advertising volume during open enrollment was not associated with calls to the kynect call center.

Our analysis tells us that state-sponsored television advertising was a substantial driver of information-seeking behavior in Kentucky during open enrollment––a critical step to getting consumers to shop for plans, understand their eligibility for premium tax credits or Medicaid, and enroll in coverage. Extrapolating to the national landscape, our data suggest that lower expenditures on outreach and advertising would reduce consumers’ information seeking. The announced 90% reduction will be paired with a nearly 40% cut to in-person enrollment assistance through navigator programs. This is particularly problematic after a tumultuous summer of legislative threats to the ACA, possibly leaving consumers confused about whether Obamacare is still the law of the land. Lower outreach could lead to a failure to engage so-called healthy procrastinators, resulting in weaker enrollment and a worsening risk pool for insurers. With an already shortened open enrollment period, this cascade of cuts is likely to further jeopardize the stability of the Marketplace.

HHS cuts ACA advertising budget by 90%

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https://www.axios.com/hhs-cuts-aca-advertising-budget-by-90-percent-2480029656.html?stream=health-care&utm_source=alert&utm_medium=email&utm_term=alerts_healthcare

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The Department of Health and Human Services announced today it’s slashing the advertising and promotional budget for the Affordable Care Act for next year. It’s planning to spend $10 million to promote the law in the open enrollment period that starts in November — compared to the $100 million the Obama administration spent last year.

Why they’re doing it: On a conference call with reporters, HHS officials argued that last year’s promotional spending — which was doubled from the year before — was ineffective because signups for new customers actually went down. They also said the $10 million budget is more in line with what Medicare Advantage and Medicare Part D spend to promote their open enrollments.

Why it matters: The Trump administration is making cost-effectiveness a major theme this year, but it’s sure to be accused of undermining ACA enrollment, given all of the Trump administration’s battles to repeal the law — and given that it also cancelled advertising for the final days of last year’s open enrollment.

One more thing: HHS is also planning to cut spending on “navigators,” who are supposed to help people enroll, by tying their funding to their effectiveness in reaching their enrollment goals last year.