There’s a lot of missing space to be filled in the map below, but what it shows is the states where at least 2,330,000 individual health insurance policies have been discontinued or cancelled as a direct result of the implementation of Obamacare:

Here’s where you can find an interactive version of the map, which shows the number of reported Obamacare-driven health insurance policy cancellations reported as of November 2, 2013.

Here’s a short summary of the states for which that data has been reported: Alabama (87,000), Alaska (5,400), California (279,000), Florida (300,000), Kansas (20,000), Kentucky (280,000), Michigan (140,000), Minnesota (146,000), Montana (20,000), New Jersey (800,000), New York (100,000), Oregon (150,000), and Wyoming (2,600).

The numbers of policy cancellations for the states where we do have data should be considered in most cases to be on the low side, because the data that we’ve been able to collect is only preliminary and because the Obama administration is reported to be pressuring health insurers to not reveal the number of policy cancellation letters they are sending out because of the changes mandated by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (better known as Obamacare).

And that doesn’t even consider the 37 states where we don’t yet have any reported numbers. Nor does it consider the millions of Americans with employer-provided health insurance coverage who, thanks to President Obama’s choice to delay the implementation of the employer-mandate portion of the Affordable Care Act for one year, won’t be receiving their cancellation letters until October 2014.

Update November 4, 2013: Additions – Pennsylvania (64,000),
Washington (266,000). Wisconsin (9,000 – Madison only), and District of Columbia (76,000 – Washington D.C. metropolitan area, includes Maryland and Virginia).

Map update to come later….

An interactive version of the updated map is available here. All told, reports indicate that 3.5 million Americans have been notified at this point that their individual health insurance policies are being terminated as a direct consequence of the Obamacare law.

Our state map above covers 2,745,000, or 78% of that figure. Aside from Wisconsin, where we only have the 9,000 figure for Madison, other states where Obamacare-driven health insurance policy termination notices have been reported to have been sent out are Colorado, Illinois and Iowa, which likely account for much of the balance.

If you want to see what’s in the policy termination notices that the Obamacare law is requiring health insurers to mail out, you can read many of them for yourself at MyCancellation.com/, along with the stories of hardship they are creating.

Update November 7, 2013: Adding Colorado (250,000), Georgia (400,000), Idaho (105,000), Indiana (108,000), Iowa (1,000), Louisiana (10,000), Mississippi (600), New Hampshire (20,000), New Mexico (26,000), and North Carolina (160,000). Here’s the updated map (interactive version here):

We do have indications that the numbers are much larger for California (possibly 900,000), Michigan (225,000) and Pennsylvania (215,000 to 250,000), but haven’t verified these numbers through multiple sources as yet.

For the numbers we do have, we now count over 3.8 million Americans who have been notified by their insurers that they have been forced out of their health insurance plan they liked because of the “Affordable Care Act”.

Update November 13, 2013: It’s official – over one million Californians are being forced out of their current health insurance coverage as a result of the Affordable Care Act. We’ll catch the map up later this week, when we’ll also hopefully be able to fill in more of it.

Update November 15, 2013: Here’s the latest update of the map, which now adds or updates the numbers of health insurance policies cancelled due to Obamacare for the states of California (1,000,000), Delaware (5,300), Maine (12,700), Maryland (73,000), Massachusetts (150,000), Nevada (24,623), Tennessee (66,000), and West Virginia (8,800). An interactive version of this map is available here.

All told, this brings the total number of individual health insurance policies either cancelled or not renewed as a direct consequence of the requirements of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act to 4,887,023. Despite President Obama’s press conference pledge to reverse the law’s devastating impact on those who bought their own health insurance coverage, the amount of time required by insurance companies to implement such a change and the cost of doing so, which President Obama did not pledge to reimburse, means that many of these negatively affected individuals will still lose their current coverage when it expires after December 31, 2013.

Update November 16, 2013: I stand corrected – the Obama administration is indeed offering health insurers a bailout to go along with the President’s “administrative fix” scheme. Chris Jacobs explains:

As previously reported, the Administration’s latest plan waives many of the costly mandates included in Obamacare that are scheduled to take effect on January 1, 2014. The guidance says that these requirements will be waived—in clear violation of the text of the law—for one year for all plans renewed between January 1, 2014, and October 1, 2014. CMS also implies these waivers could be extended, stating it will “assess…whether to extend [the waivers] beyond the specified timeframe.”

However, the real story is buried in the final paragraph of the three-page memo, where CMS implies it is exploring options to provide additional payments to insurers to offset their losses from this Obamacare debacle:

Though this transitional policy was not anticipated by health insurance issuers when setting rates for 2014, the risk corridor program should help ameliorate unanticipated changes in premium revenue. We intend to explore ways to modify the risk corridor program final rules to provide additional assistance.

To translate into English: If some Americans can keep their pre-Obamacare health plans next year, they will not enroll in the Obamacare exchanges. That means the enrollees in the exchanges are likely to be sicker than insurers previously expected. Already this afternoon, the health insurance industry trade association has alleged the President’s “fix” could have a significant impact on premiums in the marketplace, for that very reason.

And thus, Obamacare is going to become much more expensive, sooner. I’ll follow up in a new post shortly!