by Jeri Davis
See the light S
Those who started an application for for health health care care coverage prior to the Dec. 15 15 deadline deadline have have until until Dec. Dec. 20 20 to complete it.
After being contacted by officials at Renown Health, the City of Reno has placed pedestrianactivated flashing lights at a crosswalk near the hospital. Located on Kirman Avenue, just south of Aitken Street, the crosswalk is used by patients and employees of the hospital. It connects people to services at Renown hospital, Reno Hospice and Palliative Care and the Stacie Mathewson Behavioral Health & Addiction Institute. More than a dozen pedestrians have been struck and killed in Washoe County this year.
t reed The Nevada Highway Patrol put up its first “DUI Tree” years ago. You can find it at NHP’s Reno headquarters, 357 Hammill Lane. How it works is that officers hang a paper ornament on the tree for every DUI arrest they make between Thanksgiving and Christmas. The tree doesn’t celebrate arrests. It’s meant to serve as a reminder of each crash and fatality that may have been avoided when a drunken driver was removed the road.
Federal Fault Sunday was supposed to be the final deadline to enroll in health coverage for 2020 for those people in states using the website healthcare. gov, the federal marketplace for buying individual health insurance. (Nevada is not among them.) However, website glitches that were suspected to have caused enrollment difficult for many resulted in public outcry—and open enrollment was restarted on Monday. The new deadline was Wednesday, Dec. 18, at 3 a.m E.T. Consumers who already had an account could shop for plans and find out if they qualified for subsidies to lower the costs of plans using the website. In Nevada, which has it’s own health insurance exchange, those who have accounts and started the application process prior to the Dec. 15 deadline have until midnight on Dec. 20 to finish enrolling. In another 11 states and the District of Columbia, which also have exchanges, enrollment deadlines vary.
More cop S The Washoe County Sheriff’s Office has announced that it’s stepping up patrols during the holiday season as part of the Joining Forces campaign. This statewide initiative starts Dec. 20 and continues through Jan. 3. The sheriff’s office reports that more deputies will be on the roads— and they’ll be looking for people driving under the influence. Nevada Department of Public Safety’s Office of Traffic Safety provided grant funding to pay for the extra patrols. Joining Forces is a multi-jurisdictional Nevada law enforcement program that aims to reduce injuries and crashes by enforcing rules about driving under the influence, speeding, distracted driving and violations of seat belt and pedestrian safety laws.
—Jeri Davis
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RN&R
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12.19.19
Picture of health 2020 health care open enrollment has closed in Nevada the open enrollment period for people to sign up for qualified health care plans that meet the 10 essential benefits mandated by the Affordable Care Act closed in Nevada on Dec. 15. But the folks at the Silver State Health Insurance Exchange, the agency that operates Nevada Health Link—the state’s public health insurance marketplace—aren’t quite ready to release enrollment numbers. The agency is holding off on this until Dec. 23 for several reasons—the most important of which is that people who started their applications before the Dec. 15 deadline still have time to enroll. “If people started an application on or before that Sunday, then they have until December 20th to complete enrollment,” explained Silver State Health Insurance exchange communications officer Janel Davis. “We will be letting people know that, ‘Hey, guess what? Good news. You still have time because insurance is confusing, and we want to make sure that you get the coverage you need.’” People have until midnight on Dec. 20 to complete applications. To facilitate this, the Nevada Health Link call center will have extended hours. On Dec. 19, those hours will be 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. On Dec. 20, they’ll be 9 a.m. to 10 p.m.
“So the open enrollment period is very similar to tax season, and people tend to procrastinate and wait,” Davis said. “So, typically, we see quite a big surge during these last couple of days. And we’ve already noticed it in just the last 10 days after the Thanksgiving holiday.” It remains to be seen what Nevada’s enrollment numbers will be for this year, though the state was recently ranked as having the sixth highest uninsured rate in the nation. And the fact that the Trump administration removed the individual mandate requiring people to have insurance at the beginning of this year may also affect numbers. “And, unfortunately, we think that that has some influence on why younger people are not purchasing plans—and why, you know, our numbers are turning a little bit down this year,” Davis said. “So we think that’s in part due to the individual mandate going away. And the reason it was there is, you know, is that you get more people on an insurance plan and you create a more competitive marketplace and cheaper premiums.”
parting wayS This year’s enrollees will have noticed other changes specific to Nevada,
including a new online platform with fewer problems than the Federally run one—healthcare.gov—that the state relied on in the past. “Something different is we’re not using healthcare.gov to enroll people anymore,” Davis said. “So this year, people are just going to NevadaHealthLink.com. And relatively, the soft launch—the actual launch of the platform—was really smooth. Overall, a successful ride it’s been. There have been isolated issues, and we’re dealing with those as soon as we’re notified of them. But the user experience has been much better. And we haven’t had downtime like we did on healthcare. gov—or maintenance time. The first day of open enrollment, healthcare.gov was actually blacked out for the first six hours. And that didn’t happen on our exchange website.” The decision to switch to a state-run platform wasn’t just about convenience, though. It was motivated mostly by a need to save costs. That’s because, in 2017, the federal government began charging a fee to Nevada and the other state-run exchanges that used the health care.gov platform. In order to pay for this and operational costs, Nevada Health Link began collecting a percentage of the premiums charged by insurance carriers in the state. Soon, nearly two-thirds of the money Nevada’s exchange collected was being used to pay the leasing fee for the federal platform. And, in 2019, that fee was set to increase to three percent, a figure that represents nearly all of the revenue Nevada currently collects. According to Heather Korbulic, the executive director of the Silver State Health Insurance Exchange, the new, state-based platform that was unveiled in time for open enrollment this year is considerably more cost effective. “They were going to charge us almost the entire amount of revenue that we generate at the exchange,” she said. “For instance, we are projected to pay about 12 million dollars for calendar year 2019, and our contracted rate for maintenance and operations for the next year is 5 million dollars, for each year. So we know right away that we’ll have a significant savings.” Korbulic said there are other benefits to not relying on the healthcare.gov platform, too, including real-time access to data about who the exchange’s consumers are, which gives the agency