#ACAWinning Update

Turns out – and you’ll want to sit down for this – not so much:

“The percentage of Americans under 65 who had private health coverage fell in 2016, and the percentage of low-income children who had no health coverage at all rose sharply.”

That’s right: people lost their health insurance as a direct result of the ACA. Of course, their lives don’t matter.

On the other hand, a lot of previously-insured middle income folks with private health insurance lost both: adults earning 100-200% of the FPL saw their private insurance go away, replaced with Medicaid.

Oh, and this line:

“That reduced their uninsured rate to 23.2%, from 24.1%”

Is garbage: Medicaid ≠ insurance.

■ One reason for the slowdown may well be agents (such as yours truly) who’ve decided to sit out Open Enrollment altogether. Now, the Rocket Surgeons in DC© seem to have figured out that most folks don’t buy insurance, they’re sold it. So the Feds are allowing “web broker entities that meet CMS data security standards” to enroll folks directly, bypassing the notorious 404Care.gov security sinkhole.

Unfortunately. our good friend Allison Bell, in a rare misstep, gets it completely wrong:

“[H]ealth insurance agents and brokers may get to play a much bigger role in selling exchange plan coverage.”

Um, no:

“web broker entities” ≠ “health insurance agents and brokers”This is a direct hit on agents in favor of large, faceless web brokerage outfits.

/sigh