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The number of Californians signing up for health insurance for 2019 through Covered California — the state agency created by the Affordable Care Act to sell health plans to people who don’t get coverage through their employer — held steady at 1.5 million. But there was a significant drop-off in one key group that the health law has long aimed to get insured. (Ho, 1/30)

Despite the elimination of a tax penalty for those who forgo health insurance, enrollment in Covered California’s health plans remained at almost the same level as last year, with more than 1.5 million people signing up. That may sound like good news, but Covered California executive director Peter V. Lee is concerned that his agency saw a 23.7 percent drop in the number of new consumers seeking coverage. (Anderson, 1/30)

The number of new enrollees in Covered California health plans plunged by nearly a quarter this year, largely because of the elimination of the federal tax penalty for people without insurance, officials announced Wednesday. The decrease was steeper than expected — and larger than the drop in new enrollment in the federal marketplace, healthcare.gov. It occurred even as Covered California, the state health insurance exchange, spent millions on advertising to entice people to sign up for coverage during the open-enrollment period that ended Jan. 15. (Ibarra, 1/30)

The prevalence of employer-based health insurance has been slowly shrinking for many years, but new research from the University of Minnesota shows new coverage options under the federal Affordable Care Act did not hasten the decline. In a study published this month, U researchers looked at federal data before and after major health law changes kicked in during 2014, including an expansion of the Medicaid program in many states, and found the provision of health insurance among employers was largely unaffected. (Snowbeck, 1/30)

Kaiser Health News: Ads For Short-Term Plans Lacking ACA Protections Swamped Consumers’ Online �Թϲ�����es

Consumers shopping for insurance online last fall — using search terms such as “Obamacare plans,” “ACA enroll” and “cheap health insurance” — were most often directed to websites that promote individual health plans that didn’t meet consumer protections of the Affordable Care Act, according to a new study. They also failed to get adequate information about those plans’ limitations, according to the analysis by researchers at Georgetown University’s Center on Health Insurance Reforms. (Findlay, 1/31)

The partisan battle over health care continued Tuesday as the liberal group "Protect Our Care Arizona" demanded that Congress keep fighting for the Affordable Care Act amid ongoing attacks by President Donald Trump's administration. Joined by Reps. Ruben Gallego and Ann Kirkpatrick, the Democratic coalition known for defending former President Barack Obama's signature health-care-reform law — which critics on the right dubbed "Obamacare" — called for the new 116th Congress to right the wrongs they say Republicans have done in the health-care realm. (Egeland, 1/30)

State officials expect to spend tens of millions more on TennCare in coming years as Tennessee’s improving economy leads to incremental decreases in federal funding for the state Medicaid program, according to budget numbers made public this week. Currently, TennCare is Tennessee’s most expensive government agency, but the federal government pays for more than 65 percent of the costs. That funding is based on the average income throughout the state, so as Tennessee’s booming economy boosts salaries, the feds will pay for a smaller and smaller share TennCare costs. (Kelman, 1/30)