Posted on 04/04/2014 12:49:00 PM PDT by Jim Robinson
(Reuters) - Three million lower-income Americans have enrolled in the Medicaid program for the poor so far during the rollout of U.S. President Barack Obama's healthcare reform law, the administration announced on Friday.
That brings to more than 10 million the number of people who have signed up for both public and private health coverage since the October 1 launch of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare. This week, the White House announced there were 7.1 million sign-ups as of March 31 for private health plans through new electronic insurance marketplaces now operating in all 50 states, a total that exceeded most expectations.
Higher enrollment figures have given a boost to Obama and his Democratic allies against Republicans and other critics of healthcare reform by demonstrating stronger-than-expected demand for the benefits available under the new law.
"The increase in Medicaid enrollments across the country is encouraging," U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a government blog posting.
The latest data show for the first time actual enrollments in Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) from October 1 through February 28 for 46 states that have reported statistics to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Until now, HHS has been able to release only the number of people who have qualified for coverage.
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
—You know this only starts at age 55, right
Yes this is true.
I don’t know about the states’ “rolling back”
the estate repayment provisions
Those Medicaid enrollment figures could have been accomplished with a one page bill.
Are the prisoners that are being enrolled enrolling as subsidized Obamacare or as Medicaid? They have very little in the way of income so I would think they qualify as Medicaiders. Who knows?
They'd have been able to if we hadn't spent the money necessary to increase provider payments on non-working websites and pajama boy ads.
Ocare changed the rules for qualification, making additional folks eligible.
The existing community clinic program serves exactly that function, and... yes... putting more money into it would have been far more efficient. Much of Obiecare is about creating “new solutions” to problems we have existing solutions for, because just fully funding existing programs isn’t “sexy” enough... and allows fewer opportunities for vote buying and graft.
A woman just called into Mark Simone (sitting in for Hannity) and said she was on Medicare and just received a letter from HHS stating that she had been moved onto *some other form* of Medicare. She said she had never signed up for anything and never visited a HHS office. The implication being that some number of Medicaid recipients were moved from one form of Medicaid program to another form of Medicaid program. You’ll forgive me if I don’t know the proper names of the categories.
If HHS has these names (and they obviously do) and HHS just moves them from one category to another without any positive or proactive action from the insureds and then counts them as “new signups”....what should we call that? Successful implementation?
Medicare eligibility used to be determined by means testing in many states. With the advent of ozerocare, those states that agreed to Medicare expansion now determine medicare eligibiliy by income testing alone.
I personally know someone with close to two million dollars net worth, but low income. (This is the case for a large number of retired people who aren’t old enough for medicare yet.) This financially well-situated person lost his private health insurance, thanks to ozerocare. When he went online to check the ozerocare insurance exchange, he learned that his only option was to go on medicaid. He elected to go with no insurance and pray that he doesn’t have a catastrophic health event.
I believe that is the plan.
You’re confusing medicare and medicaid.
But wait — in Kentucky, 85% of the Obamacare signups were actually enrollees in the expanded Medicaid program! Calling all these #’s to be complete B.S>!!!
Medicaid eligibility used to be determined by means testing in many states. With the advent of ozerocare, those states that agreed to Medicaid expansion now determine medicaid eligibiliy by income testing alone.
Thanks for the correction :)
There’s a better alternative. If he needs to use the exchange because he wants the subsidy, then he can simply take the Medicaid coverage with the idea of only using it as a fallback in a catastrophic event. Meanwhile, he could just self-pay his regular doctor. If he doesn’t need the subsidy, he can skip the exchange completely, and just go buy a compliant policy directly from an insurance company.
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