Widgetized Section
Go to Admin » Appearance » Widgets » and move Gabfire Widget: Social into that MastheadOverlay zone
As ACA deadline looms, focus shifts to policy solutions on Western Slope
With just a handful of days left to sign up for first-of-the-year health-insurance coverage on the individual market, Colorado is actually trending ahead of the nation in terms of signing people up for plans under the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare.
Nationally, the first four weeks of the open enrollment period that kicked off Nov. 1 saw 2.4 million people signup this year compared to 2.8 million in 2017. Colorado’s state exchange, called Connect For HealthColorado, reports 46,332 signed up inthe first month this year compared to 43,881 last year, or anincrease of 5.2 percent.
In Colorado, open enrollment runs through Jan. 15 for plans that begin Feb. 1 and Dec. 15 for plans that start Jan. 1. State officials are encouraging people to go to the website and see what they qualify for in terms of both coverage and ACA premiumtax credits.
“We have a statewide network of 1,000 brokers and assisters who can help with these important decisions,” Connect for Health Colorado CEO Kevin Patterson said. “I urge anyone in Colorado who buys their own health insurance to go now to Connect For Health Colorado to see what financial help they can get. Many are pleasantly surprised with what they find.”
Former President Barack Obama on Monday took to Twitter to urge people around the country to sign up by Saturday, Dec. 15: “No jump shots. No ferns. No memes. Not this time. I’m going to give it to you straight: If you need health insurance for 2019, the deadline to get covered is December 15. Go to http://HealthCare.gov today and pass this on — you just might save a life.”
Colorado, of course, has its own exchange, with a Jan. 15 deadline for Feb. 1 coverage.
But in Colorado’s high country, the cost of individual and small-group health insurance remains prohibitively high, even with the federal government essentially stripping out the federal health-insurance mandate in the 2017 tax reform bill. Since the ACA kicked in fully in 2014, self-employed individuals and small businesses in Colorado have seen rampant increases.
For that reason, the valley-wide chamber of commerce known as the Vail Valley Partnership recently launched its One Valley Healthcare program – a medical cost-sharing alternative to health insurance that can save chamber members up to 60 percent versus traditional insurance.
As for actual health insurance, there are only two ACA options in Eagle County — Anthem and Kaiser. Before tax credits, a bronze Kaiser plan for a family of five costs around $2,200, while Anthem runs more than $2,900 – and those plans come with deductibles in excess of $6,500. A similar bronze plan on the Front Range, where there are far more options, costs around $1,600 a month before tax credits (if you qualify).
Across much of the state’s rural Western Slope there are typically only one or two ACA options, and plans for a family of five can run north of $2,000 a month. In mountain-resort counties, where everything from groceries to gas to housing costs significantly more than the state’s Front Range, it can actually be difficult to live on the family-of-five income cap of $117,680 ($48,560 for individuals) to qualify for ACA tax credits.
Connect For Health Colorado has been touting mere single-digit increases for 2019, but some observers aren’t impressed.
“Some Anthem people here actually got rate decreases, but it’s already ridiculously high,” insurance broker Bethe Wright of The Wright Insurance Company in Eagle recently told Colorado Politics. “[Obamacare] was unaffordable in 2017; it went up 30 percent in 2018; and it was unaffordable in 2018. Even if it only went up 2 percent in 2019, it was still unaffordable two years ago.”
Republican attempts to repeal and replace the ACA failed repeatedly in 2017, and critics say the GOP has since worked to undermine the law. Now Democrats, buoyed bythe 2018 midterm election results, have promised to stabilize Obamacare and expand Medicaid.
While Republicans couldn’t do away with Obamacare in 2017, they did manage to strip out its individual mandate tax penalties in their tax reform package. For that reason, a Texas-led federal lawsuit backed by 20 elected GOP officials around the country is seeking to have Obamacare and its protections for preexisting conditions deemed unconstitutional. The White House and Justice Department are not standing in the way of those efforts.
With those development as a backdrop, Wright this year stopped signing people up for Obamacare plans and is instead selling US Health Group plans underwritten by Freedom Life. The plans are considerably cheaper than Obamacare plans – with no danger of tax penalties in 2019 — but are not ACA-compliant and can deny applicants for preexisting conditions.
One of her client’s recently obtained a US Health plan for four family members for $1,350 a month but one child was denied for a moderate case of scoliosis (no surgery, braces or other treatments) – requiring a separate, catastrophic Obamacare plan from Kaiser for $250 a month. Wright says a family like that pulling out of Obamacare will lead to more ACA rate increases.
“It’s all a snowball effect,” Wright said. “Health insurance is cyclical, so in a couple years we’re going to see the impact of healthy people getting out of the Obamacare pool because they can qualify on non-compliant plans and not have to worry about the tax penalties.”
Democrats have railed against Republican efforts to undercut the ACA – without offering an alternative — just when it was starting to gain traction in most of the country.
“Many Americans are still unaware of the open enrollment period because of Trump’s sabotage,” Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez said in an email blast. “Democrats believe health care is a right for all, not a privilege for the wealthy few. That is why we’re encouraging Americans everywhere to sign up for health care coverage. Coverage may be more affordable than you think.”
But not on Colorado’s Western Slope, where Democratic state lawmakers vow to tackle the problem in the upcoming legislative session in January.
Newly elected Democratic state Rep. Dylan Roberts of Eagle – having just knocked on hundreds of doors during campaign season — is keenly aware of the pressing problem of rapidly rising health care and insurance costs in his house district,which also includes Routt County.
“Something has to happen or else the stratification of Eagle County’s socioeconomics is going to become even more stark really fast, because we’re losing those people in the middle who want to live here and want to start families here and want to be part of a productive middle class, but they can’t make it work because of health insurance costs,” Roberts said.
Roberts last legislative session ran a study bill that would have funded a hard look at the possibility of setting up a public option, allowing people to buy into a state plan at competitive rates and hopefully then drive down the prices of the private insurance companies. He’s also focused on forcing increased transparency for prescription drug and medical procedure pricing.
“Transparency is a place to start so that people can start having choices and answers as to why the prices are going up, and it might actually help insurance companies with controlling their costs, but if we’re ever going to actually reduce monthly premiums for people, it’s got to start with having more choices in the insurance market,” Roberts said.
Roberts’ efforts on both the transparency and public-option front passed out of the Democrat-controlled House but died in the Republican-controlled Senate last session. Now Dems have control over both chambers.
Adam Fox, director of strategic engagement for the Colorado Consumer Health Initiative, said reinsurance is another idea worth revisiting this legislative session. A bill was introduced late last session was killed in the Republican-controlled Senate.
“We’ve seen reinsurance work pretty well in other states like Alaska to keep premium increases down and in some cases lead to premium decreases,” Fox said. “It’s one of the more immediate ways to provide premium affordability relief in the high cost areas of the state.
“Would it bring premiums to an ‘affordable’ level for everyone? No, we need to start getting atthe underlying costs of health care and create competition in the insurance market to do that. I think it’s likely we’ll see another run at reinsurance this legislative session, and if it’s passed relatively early in the session, it could affect premium filings for the 2020 plan year that get submitted in May.”
David O. Williams
