Connecticut: The downside of frontloading: @AccessHealthCT reports 8,400 *fewer* QHPs thru 12/04

Access Health CT, Connecticut's ACA exchange, is posting updates to their Open Enrollment Period (OEP) numbers every Friday. Last week they reported 100,345 Qualified Health Plan (QHP) selections during the first 33 days of the 2021 OEP, which sounds more impressive than it is, since 94,713 of those were current enrollees having their auto-renewals front-loaded; only 5,632 of them were actually new enrollees. Nothing wrong with that, of course.

This week, they report that they have just 91,965 total QHP selections, of which 7,474 are new.

On the surface this makes no sense...this is around 8,400 fewer than last week!

I'm pretty sure the reason for the discrepancy is that, like some other state-based exchanges, AccessHealthCT front-loads auto-renewals of all of their current enrollees, then allows them to actively go in and manually cancel their renewals. So, if they have 100K enrolled this year, they'd plug all of them in for 2021, then wait and see how many choose not to stay enrolled for 2021. It sounds like quite a few Nutmeggers chose to do this over the past week, partly cancelled out by the 7,474 others who newly enrolled for the upcoming year.

I could be wrong about this, however; as I noted a few weeks ago, AHCT's reporting methodology doesn't seem to match up with their monthly board meeting slideshow:

Over 111k with coverage extended through January. High volume of projections for renewal planned to begin in December.

Verification requirements extensions continue for enrollees for the duration of the PHE. Additional wave of communications to motivate completion of open items in progress.

Planning underway to prepare for 2021 updates on income reporting guidance and future efforts to decommission extension changes.

Enrollment: To date, 11k enrollees purchased a 2021 policy. 86k yet to be renewed (Report results as of 11/16/2020)

Upcoming: 75k enrollees scheduled to automatically renew into a 2021 policy. Estimated to be complete by Nov. 25.

Huh. Not quite sure how to square this with the numbers they reported today.