Look to CHI for New Health Insurance Info This Week

It’s a big week for health insurance information in Colorado. We will see the release of Colorado’s approved 2015 insurance plan rates. We’ll also get two new estimates of how many Coloradans were uninsured in 2013. These releases provide a look into the insurance landscape before the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and how prices have changed since its enactment.

Two different estimates of 2013 uninsured rates – the American Community Survey and the Current Population Survey, both from the U.S. Census Bureau – are slated to be released this week. The 2013 uninsured estimates are a last snapshot of the uninsured before the ACA took effect this year.  CHI plans to update its Recent Estimates of the Uninsured publications with the new information. These briefs provide historical data on uninsured rates in Colorado from 2009 until present for numerous demographics. We also show how they compare with the Colorado Health Access Survey (CHAS), the state-based household survey that was last fielded in 2013.

We are also planning for the Division of Insurance’s approved 2015 insurance rate filings. Insurers submitted proposed rates in July and this week we will learn which have been approved. The question on everyone’s mind is whether the rates will increase or decrease for 2015. Joe Hanel, Senior Communications Expert, will have the answer to that question and more in an analysis he will write soon after the rates are made public.

Meanwhile, a team from CHI will attend the Colorado Public Health Association’s annual Public Health in the Rockies conference scheduled for Wednesday through Friday in Fort Collins.

Research Analyst Hannah Wear and Senior Director for Policy and Analysis Amy Downs have been asked to make a presentation titled Analyzing Lower Rates of Health Insurance Among Colorado’s Hispanic Adults on Thursday. The presentation is based on a CHI paper published earlier this year, which used data from the CHAS and a regression analysis to uncover factors associated with a 14.5 percentage point gap between in health coverage between Hispanics and non-Hispanics. You can read the report here.

Jeff Bontrager, Director of Research on Coverage and Access, traveled to Washington, D.C., last Friday to take part in an advisory meeting conducted by the State Health Access Data Assistance Center (SHADAC). The group convened to discuss best practices for data collection on health insurance status and a new study that will examine how well consumers can describe their own insurance. Jeff was invited to participate as the representative of state-based health policy organizations.

Registration for the 2014 Hot Issues in Health Care Conference is open. As a reminder, this year the second day of the conference (December 5) is open to the general public. You can find more information on the conference, as well as the link to register, on our website. Be sure to register early – space is filling up fast!