Over the past two years, I've run a lot of county-level COVID data analysis. I've plotted the data as scatter-plot graphs and bar graphs, and I even created a couple of animations which showed how the data changed over time.
Last November, while creating one of these animations, I also noticed something which made my jaw drop. I talked about it at the time, but it didn't seem to generate as much interest as I thought it merited, so today I'm plotting the data using a different layout: A simple line graph of COVID-19 death rates in the deepest Red and deepest Blue counties of the United States, plotted over time. As a bonus, in the process, a few other useful points revealed themselves visually as well.
DENVER— Connect for Health Colorado, the state’s official health insurance marketplace, is accepting applications from new and returning organizations, as well as licensed Brokers, to operate Assistance Sites and Enrollment Centers across the state.
“Assistance Sites and Enrollment Centers provide a crucial one-on-one service to help Coloradans get covered,” said Connect for Health Colorado’s Chief Executive Officer, Kevin Patterson. “They help us make sure local communities, especially those who face barriers to health coverage, can access the plans and savings we offer. I encourage interested organizations and current partners to apply for this opportunity.”
For awhile now, in spite of overwhelming evidence that COVID-19 deaths have been undercounted nationally by as much as 25%, skeptics and deniers have insisted that they're actually being overcounted because (as the now-cliche saying puts it) many are dying "with COVID but not of COVID."
For a long time now, I've been tracking & graphing COVID data at the county level, which provides a more granular look at how things are progressing on both the vaccination front as well as in terms of case & death rates. After all, there are plenty of other sources tracking & reporting state-level data.
However, once in awhile it's not a bad idea to step back and compare the two, which I'm doing today.
Starting in 2023, Health Connector coverage will include new benefits, protections, and reduced cost-sharing to advance health equity objectives. The Health Connector is among the leaders of state-based marketplaces in leveraging its plan certification process to explicitly advance and invest in targeted health equity priorities.
Informed by state and national health policy research and data, and stakeholder engagement, Health Connector staff identified health equity concerns in the health coverage landscape and designed its 2023 Seal of Approval plan certification process to advance objectives tailored to address those equity issues.
Of all the problems the ACA has encountered over the 11 years since it was first signed into law by President Obama, one of the stupidest and most irritating ones had nothing to do with Republican sabotage. The call on this one was made by the IRS (then under the Obama Administration), based on their interpretation of a few bits of language within the legislative text itself back in 2013: The Family Glitch.
We still get calls on a regular basis from people who are shopping for individual insurance because adding dependents to their employer plan is prohibitively expensive. We estimate that roughly 20 percent of the people who contact us are in this situation.
For months I posted weekly looks at the rate of COVID-19 cases & deaths at the county level since the end of June, broken out by partisan lean (i.e, what percent of the vote Donald Trump received in 2020), as well as by the vaccination rate of each county in the U.S. (nonpartisan). This basically amounts to the point when the Delta Variant wave hit the U.S., although it had been quietly spreading under the radar for a few months prior to that.
More recently, I switched to posting the same data starting on December 15th, which is (roughly) the start of the Omicron variant wave (although this is fuzzier than the start of the Delta wave).
Today is the 1-year anniversary of President Biden signing the American Rescue Plan.
Along with many other important provisions, the ARP included dramatic (but temporary) improvements to the Affordable Care Act...the most significant upgrade to the ACA since it was first signed into law by President Obama eleven years earlier.
Certified Assistors Provide Enrollment Support on SUNY and CUNY Campuses Throughout the State
March 15 is the Deadline to Enroll for April 1, 2022 Coverage
ALBANY, NY (March 10, 2022) -NY State of Health, the state’s official health plan Marketplace, today announced its partnership with SUNY and CUNY colleges throughout the State to educate students about how to enroll in affordable, quality health coverage. Informational events will take place during March, with certified enrollment assistors onsite to answer questions and provide enrollment assistance.
A few days ago, Peter Hotez MD PhD, Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine and Professor of Pediatrics and Molecular Virology & Microbiology at Baylor College of Medicine where he is also the Co-director of the Texas Children’s Center for Vaccine Development (CVD) and Texas Children’s Hospital Endowed Chair of Tropical Pediatrics, estimated that a stunning 250,000 U.S. COVID-19 deaths have been caused specifically due to people refusing to get vaccinated.
