Open Enrollment 2019

The leaves are changing. It’s Open Enrollment Season, or as the Trump Administration calls it, “Weekend at Bernie’s”.

Medicare Open Enrollment is from October 15^th to December 7^th. The compressed under age 65 Open Enrollment is now November 1^st to December 15^th. Yes they overlap. Plus, most of our group policies renew on January 1^st. Your local insurance office is very busy.

Please allow me to share a couple of thoughts.

Medicare Beneficiaries are always early for their appointments. On October 15^th, the first day of Open Enrollment, I had two clients waiting to talk with me at 1:50 for their 2 PM appointments. One was 10 minutes early. The other was 24 hours early. She was scheduled for the 16^th. That might have been shocking had we not had an unexpected visit from our friend Bob (name changed) that morning at 11 AM. His appointment? December 2^nd. Six weeks early! A new record.

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It is almost election season. Sometime over the next few months you will hear a friend say, “If (fill in the blank) wins, I’m booking the first plane to Canada!” People from both sides say that, but we all know that they aren’t going anywhere. We have an insurance version of that. Every agent has heard, “If I get sick, I’m just going to get on a plane and go back to (insert country of origin here) where it won’t cost me anything!” Seriously, they aren’t going to go back to England, Italy, or Russia the moment they feel chest pains. These people are in the USA by choice, and they really have no interest in being anyplace else. The insurance agent nods knowingly and then gets back to finding the client the right policy.

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Open Enrollment can be very stressful for both the agents and the clients. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) policies change every year. The prices usually go up. The networks expand and contract. The deductibles and copayments are tweaked annually to comply with the ever-changing regulations. We are in this together. We need your focus and attention, if only for 45 minutes to an hour. Some of our clients need to go through the Exchange to qualify for a Tax Credit Subsidy before they can pick the right policy.

This is blog has a national following and according to Google Analytics, most of you reading this are outside of my service area. So this isn’t about me, it is about You and Your agent, whether she is in Portland, Maine or Portland, Oregon. You and your agent are on the same team. Your agent, very often a small business person purchasing his/her own coverage, is there to help you get health insurance, the way most Americans access and pay for health care.

We celebrate Open Enrollment. There may not be cake. There definitely will be coffee.

DAVE

www.cunixinsurance.com

Picture – Knoxville In The Fall – David L Cunix

They Suffer Least Who Suffer What They Choose

The song is American Gothic.  The artist, David Ackles.  I remember where I was when I first heard an odd song about an unsuccessful farmer and his less-than-faithful spouse.  The payoff was the last line, “They suffer least who suffer what they choose”.  I was only eighteen, but surely I had heard something like this before though I could not recall when.  We must accept some responsibility for what we have and what we lack.  This should not be confused with blaming the victim for circumstances beyond his/her control.  It simply means that we may be part of both the problem and the solution.  Or, we may actually be OK with the status quo.

And that brings us to Texas.  WalletHub, a personal finance website, accessed health insurance data from the U.S. Census Bureau to compare the rates of uninsured in our country.  There is a lot of information here and worth a couple minutes of your time.  The graphs show the percent of uninsured by race and income, children vs. adults, and the change since the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). This is the link to the comparison by state.  This is the link to the comparison by city.  To the surprise of no one, Texas came in last.  It wasn’t even close.

The adult uninsured rate for Texas in 2018 was 20.23%, 1 in 5 of every adult in the state.  The next closest was Oklahoma at 16.31%.  The rate for children was a shocking 11.15%.  These rates are an improvement over pre-Obamacare rates.  For comparison sake, Ohio ranks 18^th with adults at 6.97% and children at 4.82%.  Not great, but not Texas.

In case you were wondering, Cleveland came in at 258^th with an adult uninsured rate of 8.99%.  Dallas is 539^th with an uninsured rate of 27.03% for adults and 16.96% for children!  There are Texas cities, like Laredo and Brownsville, with even higher numbers.

The Texas / Trump lawsuit is working its way through the courts.  Invalidating the PPACA without any replacement, transition, or clue would disrupt our system and eliminate the protections afforded so many of us by the law.  It is estimated that 27% of Americans under age 65, 53.8 million, have preexisting conditions that would impact whether or not they could purchase health insurance if we went back to asking health questions and underwriting. 

Health insurance is the way most of us access and pay for health care.  It is one thing for the residents of Texas to accept a 20% uninsured rate.  It is quite another if we let them impose that on the rest of us.  It is incumbent upon us to act.  They suffer least who suffer what they choose.

Dave

www.cunixinsurance.com

Picture –My Team, My Pain, My Choice – David L Cunix

Quick Update from NPR.