Now that we have a couple of weeks worth of hard enrollment data under our belt, it's time to start trying to break the numbers out by state and category (that is, Active Renewals, Auto-Renewals and most importantly new Enrollees). This is trickier than it sounds for several reasons:
HealthCare.Gov hasn't started breaking out their numbers across the 39 states which utilize their platform yet. For them, I had to base my estimates on what portion of the 39-state total each state had in the first 12 days last year (via CMS's Public Use File). I'm assuming the ratios within HC.gov are roughly the same this year.
Five of the state-based exchanges haven't released any enrollment data yet (CO, DC, ID, NY and VT)
The other seven state-based exchanges have released some hard data, but none of their thru-dates match up with the federal exchange (11/11).
Even then, some state exchanges have only released the number of new enrollees, not renewals (CA, WA and--I think--MD), while others have already baked in passive/auto-renewals (MN, RI), which means their renewal numbers may actually decrease over time as some who were auto-renewed already change their minds.
In addition, in those states which included auto-renewals (MN, RI), I don't know the breakout between active and passive renewal, so I had to take a guess.
With all that in mind, here's where things stand to the best of my calculations. Again, while the subsets within each category are estimates, the totals include confirmed QHP selections only. I suspect the actual total to date is well over 3 million as of 11/15/17:
More than 91,000 Minnesotans have Enrolled in Private Health Plans through MNsure for 2018
November 15, 2017
ST. PAUL, Minn.—Today, MNsure announced 91,623 Minnesotans have enrolled in private health plan coverage for 2018 through MNsure.
The numbers reported include new consumers, renewing consumers who have come back and shopped for a new plan for 2018, and renewing consumers who are continuing their previous plan for 2018.
"Our first two weeks have gone very smoothly," said CEO Allison O'Toole. "MNsure's enrollment is looking strong out of the gate. This year, we renewed twice as many people into coverage than last year, and we're also seeing a steady stream of new consumers."
As I've been saying for months now, trying to predict not just the final number but the pattern of enrollments in ACA exchange policies for the 2018 Open Enrollment Period is a fool's errand given all the batcrap insanity surrounding the ACA this go around; this would be the case even without the actual enrollment period being slashed in half.
I want to focus on one portion of their analysis which I appear to have seriously misinterpreted: The projected impact on unsubsidized individual market premiums over time.
Average premiums in the nongroup market would increase by about 10 percent in most years of the decade (with no changes in the ages of people purchasing insurance accounted for) relative to CBO’s baseline projections.
Those effects would occur mainly because healthier people would be less likely to obtain insurance and because, especially in the nongroup market, the resulting increases in premiums would cause more people to not purchase insurance.
He was an incredibly kind and generous man who was a wonderful partner for my mother for over 23 years after my dad died, and I'll miss him terribly, but he lived a full and varied life to a ripe old age, and passed peacefully in his sleep in his own home, near loving family members. You can't ask for a better way to bow out.
When he became legally blind in his later years, Oscar was partnered up with a Leader Dog for the Blind named Mello, a beautiful golden retriever, who he grew to love more than anything on this earth.
Needless to say, this is going to be a busy week for me, so I'll probably be posting less frequently than usual for a few days.
If anyone would like to help honor Oscar's memory, I'd like to suggest a contribution to either of the following organizations:
Things were looking pretty dicey for two of Montana's three insurance carriers participating on the individual market the past few days. One of the three, Blue Cross Blue Shield, saw the writing on the wall regarding Cost Sharing Reductions (CSR) likely being cut off and filed a hefty 23% rate hike request with the state insurance department. The other two, however (PacificSource and the Montana Health Co-Op, one of a handful of ACA-created cooperatives stll around), assumed that the CSR payments would still be around next year and only filed single-digit rate increases.
I'm not going to speculate as to the reasons why they both did so when it was patently obvious that having the CSRs cut off was a distinct possibility, although I seem to recall the CEO of the Montana Co-Op said something about their hands being tied since CSR reimbursement payments are legally required, after all. Basically, it sounds like he was genuinely trying to avoid passing on any more additional costs to their enrollees than they had to.
HealthSherpa is a California-based technology company focused on connecting individuals with health coverage. The site was initially developed as an alternative to research plans from Healthcare.gov, and now provides individual health, dental and vision benefits to both part-time employees and retirees. As of February 2017, over 800,000 people have been enrolled in individual health coverage through HealthSherpa.
First, I want to clarify that I'm not shilling for HealthSherpa here. They aren't paying me for this post. I have no idea whether their customer service is awesome or sucks or anything like that.
Having said that, they are a pretty good resource for getting a feel for what the big picture situation is regarding open enrollment trends each year, and they have provided me with some internal data which they've OK'd me to share publicly.
It's important to note that all of the data here refers to exchange-based enrollments only. They reiterated to me that their individual market enrollments are on-exchange only:
With the 2018 Open Enrollment Period coming up just 5 days from now, it's time to put this to bed: After 6 months of painstaking research and analysis, I've compiled a comprehensive analysis of the weighted average rate changes for unsubsidized ACA-compliant individual market policies in 2018, including both the on- and off-exchange markets. It's already been confirmed by a different analysis by healthcare consulting firm Avalere Health, which used a completely different methodology to arrive at the exact same conclusion: The national average increase is between 29-30%, ranging from as low as a 22% average premium drop in Alaska (thanks to their successful reinsurance program) to as high as a painful 58% increase in Virginia.
However, what you're looking at is, in fact, a visual breakout of the state-by-state proportions of total Qualified Health Plan selections on the ACA exchange throughout the 2017 Open Enrollment Period, which ran from Nov. 1, 2016 - Jan. 31, 2017. The data comes from the official Public Use Files from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid. As you can see, most states follow a fairly obvious trend because 39 of them are run through the federal exchange at HealthCare.Gov.
Since all 39 are administered, entered into the system and reported the same way, the only variances between them are their relative population size: Large states are thicker, small states are thinner throughout the entire enrollment period as you'd expect.
