Early Impacts of the Affordable Care Act on Health Insurance Coverage in Minnesota
State Health Access Data Assistance Center
With full implementation of the health insurance coverage provisions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) on January 1, 2014, there has been great interest in assessing the law’s early impact on health insurance coverage in Minnesota. At the request of Minnesota’s State-Based Health Insurance Marketplace, MNsure, and with support from the State Health Reform Assistance Network, researchers from the University of Minnesota’s State Health Access Data Assistance Center (SHADAC) compiled data from a variety of sources to analyze, at an aggregate level, the shifts in health insurance coverage that have taken place in Minnesota since the fall of 2013. The study finds that between September 30, 2013, and May 1, 2014, the number of uninsured Minnesotans fell by 180,500, or 40.6%, from 445,000 (8.2% of the population) to about 264,500 (4.9% of the population).
As states continue the unwinding of the Medicaid continuous coverage requirement and redetermining their enrollees, states across the country have reported scams asking consumers for financial or personal information are prevalent. This expert perspective provides recommendations on what state communications and digital teams can do to mitigate online scams and protect official sources of information.
The unwinding of the Medicaid continuous coverage requirement represents the largest nationwide coverage transition since the Affordable Care Act, with significant health equity implications. Given the intense focus on coverage transitions during the unwinding, some states have initiated plans to publish a data dashboard to monitor progress. To date, the District of Columbia and 15 states have published unwinding data in a visual dashboard format (this does not include states with pre-existing enrollment dashboards that don’t specifically identify unwinding cohorts). This expert perspective now includes an interactive map with the links to all the dashboards and states publishing CMS unwinding reports. SHVS will continue to update the EP and map as more states publish their unwinding data.
