Private Health Insurance Use Rises in HealthCare.gov States

Public health plan coverage rates, by state type:

Pure HealthCare.gov states: Increased to 17%, from 16.7%.

HealthCare.gov partnership states: Increased to 20.6%, from 19.6%.

State-based exchange rates: Increased to 24.7%, from 23.2%.

What is HealthCare.gov?

The drafters of the Affordable Care Act wanted to create a family of “health insurance exchanges,” or web-based supermarkets for health coverage, to help people shop for high-quality private health plans on an apples-to-apples basis, and use government subsidies to pay for the coverage.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) — an arm of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) — set up HealthCare.gov to provide ACA exchange programs in states that are unwilling or unable to provide all exchange services.

For 2019, HealthCare.gov is providing exchange plan enrollment services in 39 states.

In 32 states, the federal government handles all exchange-related services.

In seven “partnership” states — Arkansas, Delaware, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, New Hampshire and West Virginia — states handle some exchange duties and the federal government handles other exchange duties. Most of those states have used ACA subsidies to expand access to their Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) plans.

In California, New York, the District of Columbia and nine other jurisdictions, locally run exchange programs handle all exchange duties. All of those states have accepted ACA Medicaid and CHIP expansion funding.

Resources

The latest batch of NHIS health insurance coverage data is available here.

NHIS background information is available here.

The government does not copyright its survey data. Insurance agents and brokers can use the NHIS data on their websites and in social media campaigns free of charge.

— Read Middle-Income Consumers Drop Private Coverage, on ThinkAdvisor.

— Connect with ThinkAdvisor Life/Health on LinkedIn and Twitter.