Half of Georgia’s Obamacare Sign-ups Haven’t Paid, Says State Insurance Commissioner

The Obama administration announced last week that
8 million people had signed up for private health coverage through
the 2010 health care law. But not all of those people are covered,
because not all of those people have paid their first month’s
premium.

How many people selected a plan but didn’t mail in the first
check? The Obama administration hasn’t released exact figures, but
outgoing Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said
at the end of last month that
between 80 and 90 percent of the sign-ups had paid up.

That’s an aggregate number, however, and it doesn’t necessarily
hold for every state. For example, Georgia’s non-payment rate
appears to be much higher.

As of last week, about half of the 220,000 sign-ups recorded in
the state hadn’t resulted in payment, according to the state’s
insurance commissioner.
Via Georgia Health News:

Georgia insurers received more than 220,000 applications for
health coverage in the Affordable Care Act’s exchange as of the
official federal deadline of March 31, state officials said
Wednesday.

Insurance Commissioner Ralph Hudgens, though, said premiums have
been received for only 107,581 of those policies, which cover
149,465 people.

“Many Georgians completed the application process by the
deadline, but have yet to pay for the coverage,” Hudgens said in a
statement Wednesday.

What this tells us is that non-payment rates won’t be uniform
across the states—and that the variation between high and low
payment rates will be significant. California, for example, has

estimated that only about 15 percent of its sign-ups haven’t
paid.

The disparity is going to contribute to the unevenness of the
Obamacare experience going forward. We’ve already seen this with
the rollout of the state exchanges, some of which were basically
functional on day one, or quickly overcame initial launch problems,
and some of which are still essentially unusable.

We’ll see a similar pattern going forward. In some states,
enrollment will have beaten expectations, multiple insurers will
compete for business, and the technology will basically work. In
other states, sign-up numbers won’t translate to enrollments
because of non-payment, enrollment targets will be missed, and
administrative problems will continue.

(Link
via Jim Geraghty.)