Kevin Knauss: Health, History, Travel, Insurance
Posts related to how California MAGI Medi-Cal works, especially with Covered California, enrollment, termination, household income.
The question no one can answer for me is if the expanded Medi-Cal HMO capitation rates have been decreasing because there are more healthy people in the Medi-Cal pool? Or are there other factors that are driving down the rates. There must be good money in Medi-Cal as Aetna, Blue Shield, and United Healthcare have all been approved to offer Medi-Cal HMO plans alongside other private health insurance companies such as Anthem Blue Cross, Health Net, Kaiser, and Molina.
For a single adult applying through Covered California, the monthly income must be greater than 138% of the Federal Poverty Level ($1,397 monthly, $16,754 annually) in order to qualify for private health insurance with the premium tax credit subsidy. If the individual or household is below 138% of the FPL, they will be deemed eligible for Medi-Cal.
A significant drop in household income does not qualify you to apply to Covered California for the tax credit subsidy to lower your monthly health insurance premium. If you are already in Covered California, you can report a change of income and then select a different health plan.
Perhaps the most difficult part of the Covered California application for the consumer is creating a password. The rules are very strict and have not always been adequately explained. Covered California has included more information to help consumers create a password when they have to reset it. The biggest complaint after the password has been rejected is that the system tells the consumer that the pass word cannot contain a dictionary word. You would be amazed at how many two letter combinations actually are words found in a dictionary. Hint: don’t put two letters together when creating a password. Always have letters separated by a number or special character.
I find it amusing that the strategy to kill off government funded and managed health insurance for people may be the very illustration and demonstration of how single payer can work. The added benefit is a nod to the fact that, if included, volunteer work or family care work is treated as equally valuable as a wage earning job for eligibility for Medicaid. This is an acknowledgement that people volunteering in our communities plays an important role in the maintenance of the community fabric.
I don’t mind enrolling people into Medi-Cal. I’m a one-person operation and I enjoy chatting with people. But I have to draw the line with people who insist on me answering a million questions and then failing to give me the appropriate information to complete their Covered California Medi-Cal eligibility application. I also will not knowingly participate in any misrepresentation or fraud so a person can either be enrolled in Medi-Cal or be determined eligible for the tax credits through Covered California.
One of my clients received a letter from Covered California notifying her that her monthly premium would jump from $63.64 to $993.45 per month. The letter casually stated that the premium increase was 147.2%. The client is a household of two people one eligible for Covered California and the spouse is on Medicare. When I went through the renewal procedure on the updated Covered California website, I had to re-confirm that the spouse was on Medicare. The final eligibility results were that the Medicare spouse could select a plan at the full premium amount while the primary applicant could select a plan with the monthly subsidies.
If Bribes are a legitimate source of income for Medi-Cal why not for Covered California I thought? When I checked the 2016 Covered California Countable Sources of Income table, Bribes was suspiciously missing from the list. Why is Covered California hiding this significant source of income for many politicians from their consumers?
Access to health care services is not equal in the United States. Your health plan determines the type of care you receive. The health plans in the employer, individual, and Medicaid markets are separate and they are not equal. The ACA moved us in direction of more equality for all residents regardless of the market type of the health plan. Current Republican proposals under President Trump will widen the gap in disparity between group plans and individual plans. We need to move in a direction the guarantees access to the same level of health care services regardless of whether you work for government, a large employer, have your own individual plan, or are awarded Medicaid because of your income. It is time to dismantle the flawed ‘separate but equal’ assumption of health insurance in the United States.
When a union goes on strike it can be difficult for union members and those trade members associated with the union to keep paying their health insurance premiums with either reduced or no income. There are options to maintaining health insurance if you know the rules of the health insurance game. These rules revolve around Special Enrollment Periods with the qualifying event of loss of coverage.
