The noble attempt to offer more universal, less expensive availability to healthcare is essentially in its second quarter of operations. We know of all the delays, etc…. involved in the initial launch back in October of 1013 (software essentially) and for all intents and purposes, that issue is vastly improved. Obamacare’s 2014 open enrollment period is ending and the Department of Health and Human Services has released statistics for the first quarter of 2014.
The positives: Through the end of March, 2014, the exchanges have enrolled approximately 4.2 million people. A question arises however, regarding how many of those enrollees are actually paid in full, and truly have coverage. Total enrollment has increased modestly, adding a bit fewer than one million new enrollees through the month of February. Enrollees are benefiting from “premium credits” and maximizing cost-sharing subsidies, by choosing silver plans for the majority of coverage options selected (63%).
The negatives: The following statistics unfortunately do not look as promising. The most important group of enrollees commonly referred to as “the young and healthy” (a key component to the success of this law) continues to remain at 25% of total enrollment. As structured in this law, this group of participants must be a larger component of the pool of enrollees to offset the costs of the “not so healthy” getting a reasonably priced insurance plan. This issue has caused premiums to be higher than desired with out of pocket deductibles soaring to try and tackle these higher premiums. Ultimately, if the young and healthy do not participate in large enough numbers, governmental funds will have to be used to support the insurance carriers bearing the unhedged risks of an older pool of insured.
The solution would be enrolling older healthy individuals. This strategy would work considering that a healthy 40 year old might not use much more affordable healthcare resources than a healthy 28 year old, but will pay much higher premiums on the age factor alone.
Statistics for the second quarter of 2014 will be published soon and this topic will be discussed again in light of the new numbers (if any).
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