STOCK MARKET WATCH -- Thursday, 15 October 2015

[Demeter]

10. Insurance Dropouts Present a Challenge for Health Law

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/12/us/insurance-dropouts-present-a-challenge-for-health-law.html?_r=2

Stephanie Douglas signed up for health insurance in January with the best intentions. She had suffered a stroke and needed help paying for her medicines and care. The plan she chose from the federal insurance exchange sounded affordable — $58.17 a month after the subsidy she received under the Affordable Care Act.

But Ms. Douglas, 50, who was working about 30 hours a week as a dollar store cashier and a services coordinator at an apartment complex for older adults, soon realized that her insurance did not fit in her tight monthly budget. She stopped paying her premiums in April and lost her coverage a few months later.

“When you owe on your house, on your truck, when you’re a single parent of a college student and you have other bills,” she said, “it just doesn’t work.”

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On Nov. 1, a new sign-up period for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act will begin, and insurers, health care providers and enrollment groups are ramping up campaigns to encourage 10.5 million eligible uninsured people to buy policies. But even as those efforts begin, the public insurance exchanges, also known as marketplaces, created by the law are facing another challenge: keeping the customers they already have. About 9.9 million people were enrolled in the federal and state marketplaces at the end of June, a drop of about 15 percent from the 11.7 million who the Obama administration said selected plans during the open enrollment period that ended in February. Though there is no comprehensive data on why people drop or lose their marketplace coverage, enrollment counselors, health care providers and consumers say cost is a factor. In some cases, people lost jobs or their income dropped after they enrolled. Other people signed up for coverage only to decide later that they could not afford it. Still others dropped their insurance after their federal subsidies — intended to help pay premiums — were reduced or eliminated because the government could not verify their incomes or concluded that they were earning more than they had reported on their applications. The cost of marketplace coverage may be particularly challenging for some in Mississippi and 19 other states that have not expanded Medicaid to provide largely free health care for people earning up to 138 percent of the poverty line. Many of these people can receive federal subsidies to help pay for private plans. But the subsidies do not always help enough...

AND THEN, THERE'S THE PAPERWORK, AND THE TOTAL LACK OF UNDERSTANDABILITY...