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More than half of U.S. states have taken steps to create marketplaces for selling health coverage to the uninsured required under the 2010 health care law, the U.S. reported Wednesday.
Fourteen states and the District of Columbia have enacted legislation or executive orders creating so-called insurance exchanges that will offer websites and telephone services where people without coverage can shop for subsidized policies starting in 2014. Another 14 have indicated they plan to follow suit, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said in a report Wednesday.
“States are taking strong steps to implement health reform,” White House Deputy Chief of Staff Nancy-Ann DeParle said in a statement. “We will ensure Americans in every state have access to an exchange and the same kinds of insurance choices as members of Congress.”
The report pointed to Republican governors including Alabama’s Robert Bentley and Idaho’s Butch Otter who have started building exchanges while their states pursue a constitutional challenge to overturn the law at the U.S. Supreme Court. Other Republican governors cited were Michigan’s Rick Snyder and Nevada’s Brian Sandoval.
“Establishing an exchange does nothing to change the fact that Obamacare is an overwhelmingly bad deal for both states and taxpayers, nor does it indicate support,” said Mike Schrimpf, a spokesman for the Republican Governors Association in Washington. The White House, he said, “is desperate to show progress and is selectively searching for any evidence that states are taking action.”
About 24 million Americans are projected to buy insurance through the exchanges through 2019, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The federal government will open exchanges in states that don’t show progress building their own by the end of the year, such as by passing enacting legislation.
Eight states have either taken no action toward opening an exchange or have said they won’t, according to the Menlo Park, Calif.-based Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit that tracks implementation of the health law. They are: Alaska, Texas, South Dakota, Ohio, New Hampshire, Florida, Louisiana and Arkansas.
Massachusetts opened the nation’s first insurance exchange, called the Connector, in 2006. Connector health plans covered about 172,000 people in the state, the agency said in December. Utah followed in 2009, though its exchange is aimed at small businesses and provides insurance for less than 6,000 people.
California was the first state to authorize an exchange after the national health law passed in March 2010.
The government has awarded about $730 million in grants to states to help build exchanges. Every state but Alaska has accepted at least an initial planning grant of about $1 million. Rhode Island has received the most money, $65 million.
