With Thursday being the deadline to buy health coverage that starts on Feb. 1 under the Affordable Care Act, more than 202,000 New Jersey residents have already picked a plan, a federal report said Wednesday. That’s a 25 percent increase over last year, with a last-minute surge still expected, federal officials said.
“We’ve had a strong start,” said Andy Slavitt, a senior official with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, which runs HealthCare.gov, the federal marketplace for New Jersey. Another month remains to purchase coverage for this year and avoid incurring a tax penalty for 2015.
“New Jersey is one of the 10 largest markets of all the states that use HealthCare.gov,” Slavitt said, behind Florida, Texas, North Carolina, and five other states. Nearly 6.8 million people in the 37 states that use HealthCare.gov this year have selected plans, the federal-marketplace snapshot said. The report did not include data from states that run their own insurance marketplaces, including California and New York.
The report was issued on a day that Sylvia Burwell, the secretary of Health and Human Services, announced a special push to reach Spanish-speaking residents, who are more likely than other groups of Americans to be uninsured.
“We are doubling down … and expanding outreach to these communities,” she said, noting that a third of HealthCare.gov’s advertising budget is being used to target Hispanic communities, up from 10 percent last year. Calls to Spanish-speaking assistance counselors at the marketplace call center have increased, and the Spanish-language website, CuidadoDeSalud.gov, has been improved.
Although 2.6 million Latinos have gained health insurance since October 2013, “more needs to be done,” Burwell said. “It’s time to shop for an affordable plan that meets your budget and health needs.”
Bilingual enrollment assistance counselors are available daily at a walk-in center on Anderson Avenue in Cliffside Park and at several locations in Paterson. The Paterson Community Health Center on Clinton Street has counselors available, as does North Hudson Community Action at its Passaic health centers.
A new survey shows that last year — the first year of Obamacare enrollment — three significant trends were reversed. For the first time since 2001, fewer Americans were uninsured, fewer had medical debt or found it difficult to pay medical bills, and fewer delayed medical care because of its cost.
“Uninsured rates have declined to their lowest levels in more than a decade,” said Sara Collins, author of the report by the Commonwealth Fund, a non-profit philanthropy engaged in health policy research. Young adults between 19 and 34 showed the greatest gains in coverage.
The federal report on enrollment, which provides statistics through Jan. 9, included those who were automatically reenrolled in the plans they purchased last year, as well as newcomers to the federal insurance marketplace. Those who bought health coverage last year, but did nothing to choose a new plan or update their financial information by mid-December, were rolled over into the same plan at the end of last month. They may still change plans before Feb. 15, if they wish. It’s not known how many people that affected.
The first month of sign-ups saw more than eight in 10 New Jersey residents eligible for federal tax subsidies to purchase insurance, about the same percentage as last year, the report said. As this year’s tax-filing season gets under way, increased awareness of the tax penalties for those who went without coverage in 2014 is expected to motivate more to buy insurance, Slavitt said.
News of the sign-ups so far “continues to be encouraging, if not astounding,” said Joel Cantor, director of the Rutgers Center for State Health Policy. The federal health overhaul “seems to be working as intended.”
He noted that the number of individuals who buy their own health insurance in New Jersey — and do not receive it through an employer or Medicare or Medicaid is at a high, at 261,500. “It will be more than 300,000 when the dust settles” this year, he predicted.
“This is the hardest part of the market to make function well,” he said, “and it seems to be functioning well. The fact that we saw stable premiums in the first year is good news.”
Premiums for the most popular level of coverage offered on the marketplace – the silver plan – stayed virtually the same from 2014 to 2015, although the least-costly plan was offered by a different company. And two new insurance carriers entered the marketplace for individual coverage, bringing the total to five. In most New Jersey counties, applicants have a choice of 40 or more plans.
Combined with additional Medicaid enrollment last year of nearly 400,000 low-income New Jersey residents, that puts a big dent in the state’s uninsured population. An estimated 1.3 million people in New Jersey lacked health insurance at the launch of the Obamacare policies in 2013, with 900,000 of them eligible for coverage.
Date: January 14, 2015