You already know how the Affordable Care Act failed to provide funding for the federally run health insurance exchanges. These are the exchanges HHS is setting up in states that refuse to set up their own, which contrary to initial predictions ended up being over half the states. HHS has been scrambling to find the funding to run these exchanges (the GOP House has refused to help fix the error and allocate additional funding).
All of that you know. But Dylan Scott started crunching the numbers yesterday on how much money individual states are dedicating to promotion and outreach about the new exchanges. (We now know that most young people don’t know anything about the exchanges, and since young, healthy people are key to the actuarial success of the exchanges and enrollment begins in October, it’s critical to get the word out to them). Here’s where the lack of funding for the federally run exchanges really becomes an issue.
Just one example: The total population of Colorado, which set up its own exchange, is smaller than the uninsured population of Rick Perry’s Texas, which refused to set up an exchange — but Colorado has more money ($21 million+) than Texas ($20.8 million) to spend on outreach.
