Feds Grant Massachusetts Extra Year to Complete Obamacare Transition

After former Massachusetts Gov.
Mitt Romney signed the state’s 2006 health care overhaul into law,
he said on multiple occasions that the state’s system, which
included an insurance mandate, preexisting conditions rules, an
expansion of Medicaid eligibility, and a government-run insurance
exchange, was intended as a model for the nation.

A few years later, in 2010, President Barack Obama would sign a
nation law into place that included all of those elements and that,
according to the administration, had been modeled at least in part
on the Massachusetts system.

Four years after that, when Obama’s exchanges went online,
Massachusetts was one of the states that had the hardest time
making the transition—this despite more than $135 million worth of
federal grants intended to help the state build and manage a new,
Obamacare-compliant exchange. 

Like Maryland and Oregon, the state was a recipient of an “early
innovator” grant intended for states that were especially
enthusiastic about implementing the health law and wanted to
produce exchange technology that other states could emulate. And
like Maryland and Oregon, Massachusetts ended up with an exchange
that, for all practical purposes, simply didn’t work. By the middle
of March, the state had a massive backlog of unprocessed insurance
applications—a backlog it only cleared by
extending “transitional” insurance to the applicants, which is
a gentle way of saying it
stuck most of those folks in Medicaid until its exchange
troubles were sorted out. 

That could be a while. The state is hoping—fingers crossed!—to
have a “functional” health exchange by this fall, when the next
open enrollment period begins. But “functional” doesn’t mean
complete. “We are not going to have everything we want for the
fall,” Sarah Iselin, who is overseeing the repair work,
told Boston.com earlier this month. 

Indeed, it appears that some of the features won’t be ready
until 2017. The Obama adminstration announced yesterday that it
would give the state an additional year to comply with some of the
particulars of Obamacare’s insurance regulations.
Via MassLive.com. 

Massachusetts has been given an additional year to transition to
a new system under the Affordable Care Act that would change the
way insurance carriers calculate premiums for Massachusetts
businesses and potentially drive up the cost for many
employers.

Outgoing Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius
granted the additional year to complete the transition to new
premium rating factors on Thursday after previous requests from the
governor for a complete waiver were not granted. 

This follows yesterday’s news that the
administration would likely take over Oregon’s failed
exchange.