Local News

Washington residents are not affected by President Obama’s announcement that canceled health insurance plans will be extended by an additional two years.

Plans that expired at the end of 2013 will stay dead in Washington, the state’s insurance commissioner confirmed Wednesday.

After getting hammered by critics for his pledge that if you liked your insurance coverage you could keep it, Obama in November gave states the option of bringing back discontinued health plans for a year. This week he upped it by two more years.

Roughly 230,000 people in Washington received letters this fall informing them that their current plans were being eliminated because they failed to meet the new requirements prescribed by the Affordable Care Act. The customers were offered new plans by their insurance company, often at a higher price.

Commissioner Mike Kreidler quickly declined Obama’s offer to bring back the defunct plans, citing concerns that it would add confusion to the market and create a logistical challenge.

The number of Washington residents insured through the state’s health insurance exchange keeps rising, but those struggling with their applications still face lengthy waits for help.

The state’s toll-free help line has been swamped since the launch of Washington Healthplanfinder this fall. The center has increased its staff from about 135 customer representatives in October to 525 now.

More than 106,000 residents have bought insurance through Healthplanfinder, the state’s insurance marketplace, according to the latest weekly report released Monday. An additional 322,000 people have used the site to sign up for Medicaid for the first time, including those who are newly eligible thanks to the expansion of the program under the Affordable Care Act and those who previously qualified but did not enroll.

Are the new ads promoting health insurance for Washington’s young people quirky, hip and funny — or are they insulting and offensive? Michael Marchand says it doesn’t matter. “I don’t care if people like or hate what I’m doing, so long as they get the url right,” said Marchand, director of communications with the Washington Healthplanfinder, the website…

With little more than a month to go before the March 31 cutoff to sign up for health insurance this year, Washington Healthplanfinder has passed a milestone, with more than 100,000 residents now enrolled in commercial health plans through the state’s online marketplace. Signups for the expanded Medicaid program topped 202,000 newly eligible adults as of Feb. 20,…

If you attend roller derby and ice hockey you may see something new: signs, booths and videos encouraging you — particularly if you’re young — to sign up for health insurance through Washington Healthplanfinder, the state exchange marketplace. The coveted “young invincibles” are the target of this new campaign, which is gearing up as the…

The number of people signing up for health insurance through the state is growing at a modest pace, while enrollment of new Medicaid recipients surges ahead.

Nearly 91,000 residents have purchased health insurance from the Washington Healthplanfinder exchange. Each week enrollment has ticked up about 3 percent, following a spike in sign ups during the first few weeks of December.

Thanks to the expansion of who is eligible for Medicaid, the number of new participants in the free health-care program has increased to nearly 185,000, based on enrollment data ending Feb. 6.

Overall, nearly 650,000 people have enrolled in insurance plans or Medicaid through Washington Healthplanfinder. But it’s not always easy. People who call the state’s free help line spend on average 37 minutes trying to get the answers they need. Others say they have struggled to fix mistakes in their enrollment information, including the date their insurance is supposed to start.

Medicaid enrollment in Washington state has grown so high so fast that the state already has met its April goal for new participants under Medicaid expansion. By Jan. 30, more than 172,700 newly-eligible adults had signed up for the free health insurance. The state was aiming for 136,000 enrollees by the start of April. While the success…

In Washington, nearly 1 million residents are uninsured, few part-time and low-income workers are offered insurance from their employers, and hospitals and clinics provide more than $1 billion worth of unpaid-for medical care.

But you already knew our health-care system was broken, right? What you probably didn’t know was how quickly it’s been going downhill in recent years.

A report released Thursday from the state’s Office of the Insurance Commissioner examines who in Washington state is uninsured or “under-insured,” meaning they have insufficient coverage. Consider these troubling trends:

• Over the past decade, there’s been a nearly 11 percent decline in the number of employers offering insurance to their workers. Only 26 percent of part-time workers get employer-provided coverage.
• Also during this time, insurance premiums for families buying their own coverage have increased more than 70 percent. Premiums for employees paying their share of employer-provided coverage have increased 100 percent.
• The amount of uncompensated care — medical care that hospitals and others provide but that isn’t paid for — nearly tripled, growing from roughly $360 million in 2003, up to more than $1 billion in 2012.

Source: Data from Washington Healthplanfinder and Washington Health Care Authority, through Jan. 23.

More than 320,000 people have signed up for insurance or newly enrolled in Medicaid through Washington’s online health insurance exchange.

Of that number, more than 86,000 are now covered by private insurance purchased through the exchange, according to state data ending Jan. 23. The rest are new participants in Medicaid.

Most of the enrollees who are signed up for private insurance will receive tax breaks to help pay for their insurance premiums. Many are also eligible for subsidies that reduce their out-of-pocket costs for medical bills.

The rate of enrollment was initially slow after the exchange launched Oct. 1. As was the case for websites around the nation, the state’s online exchange — Washington Healthplanfinder — was plagued with technical problems in the first few weeks of operation.

In December, the number of people purchasing plans spiked as the site improved and as people scrambled to get insurance coverage that began the first of the year.

Number of people insured by each company selling health plans through Washington Healthplanfinder; data from Washington Health Benefit Exchange.

Premera Blue Cross and its subsidiary LifeWise are capturing the majority of folks enrolling in Washington’s new health insurance marketplace, according to data released Thursday by state officials. Nearly 43,000 people — almost two-thirds of the total enrollees — signed up for coverage from the two insurance companies through the end of December.

Group Health Cooperative was the next most popular company, selling plans to more than 18 percent of enrollees.

The insurance marketplace — called Washington Healthplanfinder — launched in October as part of the Affordable Care Act and sells individual and family health insurance plans. Plans are also sold outside of the exchange through brokers and directly from insurance companies.

Eight insurance companies are selling plans through Healthplanfinder, though most are available only in certain counties. LifeWise is the only company selling a statewide plan.