Uncertainty, Headwinds Hurt Final Marketplace Enrollment Total

On February 3, 2017, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services released its final snapshot of plan selections for the fourth Healthcare.gov open enrollment period, which ended on January 31, 2017. As of that date, 9,201,805 individuals had selected plans through Healthcare.gov in the 39 states that it serves. About 3 million of these were new consumers and 6.2 million were returning consumers.

This number does not include plan selections through the dozen state-based marketplaces that do not use HealthCare.gov. It is a count of individuals who selected plans, not of those who actually paid a binder premium payment and thus effectuated enrollment. Effectuated enrollment counts will be released later.

The enrollment total is down from 9,625,982 who had selected plans by the end of the third open enrollment period on January 31, 2016. Enrollment had been running ahead of last year until the final two weeks of open enrollment for 2017, January 15 to January 31. But 376,260 consumers selected plans in the final two weeks for 2017, while in the final week of open enrollment in 2016, 686,708 enrolled.

There had been concern the President Trump's executive order challenging the ACA, wide publicity surrounding Republican efforts to repeal it, and the withdrawal of marketplace advertising in the final week by the Trump administration might discourage consumers from enrolling in marketplace coverage. This has quite clearly happened.

Update Of Civil Money Penalty Amounts

In one of its first final rules to be published under the Trump Administration, the Department of Health and Human Services released on February 2, 2017, a schedule of statutorily required civil money penalty inflation updates for 2017. A handful of these address ACA marketplace insurance issues, including:

• an update for the per-day, per-affected individual civil money penalty for violating rules or standards of behavior of insurers in the federal marketplace, from $150 in 2016 to $152 for 2017;
• an update for the civil money penalties for providing false information on a marketplace application or knowingly and willfully disclosing protected information from the marketplace, from $27,186 to $27,631; and
• an update of the civil money penalty for knowingly and willfully providing false information to the marketplace, from $271,862 to $276,310.

from Health Affairs BlogHealth Affairs Blog http://ift.tt/2lcqyNv