The Delaware Health Exchange Enrollment Campaign Begins

DHSS kicked off the official enrollment campaign for the Delaware Health Exchange at the LACC on Monday. Delawareans should be able to view the available plans, enroll in plans and assess their eligibility for subsidies or Medicaid starting on October 1, via the Choose Health Delaware website. This should mean that starting soon, Delawareans should be bombarded with information about insurance coverage through a variety of media and venues. In addition, the ACA has provisions for hiring groups and individuals to help do outreach about the program and eligibility as well as other individuals (Navigators) who assist those who want or need help working with the website. Today’s NJ has an article on the beginning of the outreach here:

To help get the message out, four community organizations – Brandywine Women’s Health Associates, Christiana Care Health System, Delmarva Foundation and Westside Family Healthcare – are employing marketplace guides to help reach uninsured residents and connect them to coverage on the marketplace. Those organizations received portions of a $4 million grant from the federal government for the informational campaign.

The federal government awarded a separate $550,000 grant to Chatman LLC, a Maryland-based company, to hire eight navigators operating in a similar vein.
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In southern Delaware, Delmarva Foundation will be taking a “small-town” philosophy to connect with residents and small businesses in Kent and Sussex counties, said Susan Myers, vice president of quality health strategies for the quality improvement association.

We still don’t know the pricing of the plans that have been selected for the Exchange, even though much larger states have gotten their rates approved and published. Approval for these plans and rates should come this month — going live with the Exchange won’t mean much until they are.

So expect to hear more than you ever expected to on the Delaware Health Insurance Exchange in the coming months. Given how many people were tuned out to the ACA debate (and how many people were really ill served by the media coverage of the horserace, rather than the details of the policy), AND how much disinformation the right continues to inject to this conversation — these outreach efforts have their work cut out for them.