This year, the state has added 570,000 new enrollments to its Affordable Health Care Plans.
Texas now leads all states across the US in people newly covered by health insurance, after having added 570,000 people to its Affordable Health Care Plans.
The state made a number of important changes to boost the appeal and affordability of coverage.
To help overcome its uninsured problem and bring in almost 570,000 new enrollments for 2023, Texas boosted its subsidy, implemented a new state rate law, and repaired the “family glitch”. The outcome has been that the state has managed to put a big dent in the massive number of people there who were going without health insurance coverage. The effort was so successful that it managed to sign up more people than any other state in the country for the third year in a row.
With the additional new enrollees, Texas now has over 2.4 million people covered through HealthCare.gov plans and who signed up for their coverage during the open enrollment period that closed on January 15. This data was according to recently released federal figures.
This new Texas total more than doubled the number of people with health insurance in three years.
The Lone Star State’s enrollment has more than tripled in three years due to its efforts to correct its struggles with uninsured residents. In fact, its enrollment rate grew by 31 percent when compared to the nationwide growth rate, which was 12.4 percent.
Federal subsidies played an important role in this effort. The changes implemented during the pandemic have been extended through 2025. The ecosystem and overall savings made investigating coverage for the first time a far more appealing option for many people. It also made coverage affordable for more people for the first time. The subsidies were extended to people earning over 400 percent of the federal poverty level, which was just over $92,000 for a family of three in 2022.
There was also a rule change put into place for the first time regarding family members. This made it possible to subsidize other family members separately when the employer-sponsored coverage through the family’s main earner wasn’t affordable for all members.
Even Texas’ Republican lawmakers – who have been vocally opposed to the Affordable Care Act since it was passed in 2010 – worked to make the health insurance plans on the exchange more appealing to Texans. To do so, they passed a “focused rate review” bill requiring health insurance companies to align premiums across various coverage tiers.
