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.
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.
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“It is a have-to-get-done that’s really hard to get done,” said one lobbyist.
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Some strategists expect Democrats will consolidate around some form of single payer by 2020, though others won’t concede that as a given. The problem: most people don’t think a single payer system has a shot at becoming law anytime soon, and playing to the party’s base may ignore real concerns about affordability.
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Molina Healthcare’s stock tumbled after hours Wednesday after the health insurer posted a fourth-quarter loss that was attributed to parts of Obamacare — a big problem for one of the health insurers that has had success in the program.
However, the company didn’t lose money because it had sicker-than-expected enrollees. In fact, medical costs for its Obamacare enrollees were $120 million lower than Molina thought. Instead, Molina got slammed because it had healthier members and had to pay $325 million into an Obamacare program called risk adjustment, which pools money from insurers in a given state and redistributes it to those who had higher-cost enrollees.
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Just 8.8% of Americans lacked health insurance as of this past September, according to the latest numbers from the National Health Interview Survey conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But more insured people are on the hook for sizable portions of their health care costs. More than 39% of Americans younger than 65 are enrolled in a plan with a high deductible — a big increase from 2010, when 25% of people were in a high-deductible policy. Popular Republican plans to replace Obamacare rely heavily on high deductibles and health savings accounts.
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