About 100,000 people signed up for health insurance through the online federal exchange last month, a roughly four-fold increase from October even as a team of U.S. government and contractor programmers was fixing the troubled Affordable Care Act website, said a person familiar with program’s progress.
The preliminary November numbers reflect individuals who successfully selected a plan.
Now, there's some important points to keep in mind here:
NOTE: This was originally posted over at Daily Kos. I've since ported it over here for archival purposes.
Yes, that's right--thanks to new data out of West Virginia and clarified/confirmed data out of California, the ACASignups.netspreadsheet just saw the Medicaid/SCHIP expansion total nearly double, to nearly 1.4 million.
Specifically, this article in USA Today (provided by dKos member ybruti), which notes that WV authorities personally contacted 118,000 people deemed eligible for Medicaid expansion and have already enrolled over 54,000 of them.
NOTE: This was originally posted over at Daily Kos. I've since ported it over here for archival purposes.
've added a few new numbers to ACASignups.net, but the main changes are some new features:
--First, I'm "changing" the name from ObamacareSignups.net to ACASignups.net. Both will take you to the same spreadsheet, of course, but ACASignups.net is just shorter and easier to type. Use whichever one you feel is appropriate when reposting.
--Second, as I mentioned last week, by popular request, I've added graphical charts showing both the ACA Private Exchange enrollments as well as a comparison against the Massachusetts enrollment pattern of 2007.
--Third (and this is BRAND NEW), I've added the actual official HHS Dept. Per-State Goals for the 6-month enrollment period! This answers the question about where the mystical "7 million" figure came from, broken down by state (more about this below the fold).
--As far as I can tell, 2 of the other websites that were tracking ACA enrollments have abandoned the project: Advisory Board Company and Aaron Strauss. However, EnrollMaven.com is still keeping at it.
NOTE: This was originally posted over at Daily Kos. I've since ported it over here for archival purposes.
Meanwhile, since the official HHS report last week, I've made some major changes to the ObamacareSignups.netspreadsheet:
Going forward, whenever possible I'm going to only be listing actual enrollments for each state. In this sense, my numbers will more closely parallel EnrollMaven.com, an openly anti-ACA website that's also been tracking Obamacare signups. I was highly skeptical of EnrollMaven at first, but their methodology seems to be sound. In addition, they've at least been completely frank about their negative opinion of the ACA, and many of my sources have turned out to be identical to theirs, so I've grown pretty comfortable with using them as a cross-check on my own numbers.
However, there's still a few important differences between their site and ObamacareSignups.net:
--I'm continuing to include Medicaid and SCHIP enrollments, which they don't track; this is still a crucially important factor, both for the success of the ACA as well as from a purely humanitarian POV
NOTE: This was originally posted over at Daily Kos. I've since ported it over here for archival purposes.
Meanwhile, since the official HHS report last week, I've made some major changes to the ObamacareSignups.netspreadsheet:
Going forward, whenever possible I'm going to only be listing actual enrollments for each state. In this sense, my numbers will more closely parallel EnrollMaven.com, an openly anti-ACA website that's also been tracking Obamacare signups. I was highly skeptical of EnrollMaven at first, but their methodology seems to be sound. In addition, they've at least been completely frank about their negative opinion of the ACA, and many of my sources have turned out to be identical to theirs, so I've grown pretty comfortable with using them as a cross-check on my own numbers.
However, there's still a few important differences between their site and ObamacareSignups.net:
--I'm continuing to include Medicaid and SCHIP enrollments, which they don't track; this is still a crucially important factor, both for the success of the ACA as well as from a purely humanitarian POV
NOTE: This was originally posted over at Daily Kos. I've since ported it over here for archival purposes.
Hey, GOP: EAT ME!!
Yeah, that's right: I wandered through the Healthcare.Gov desert for 40 days (well, 48 to be precise) and came out the other side with a small, but not insignificant subsidy for my family and I. $62/month or $744/year. Not huge, but that's enough to cover, say, our cable bill, anyway.
More importantly, this is based on our projected income next year. If we end up falling short, our actual subsidy could be significantly higher (or lower, if we do better than expected, although that would be a good problem to have, of course).
I haven't actually enrolled in a plan yet, although I did a bit of window shopping just to make sure that the site would actually let me do so. My wife and I will do so together later this week, under calmer, more organized circumstances. We do have 22 Silver or Gold plans to choose from, and while our actual premiums look to be fairly close to what we're paying now, the coverage should be better.
Meanwhile, since the official HHS report last week, I've made some major changes to the ObamacareSignups.netspreadsheet:
The reason I was including both applications as well as actual enrollments is because most of the reports didn't bother to distinguish between the two. Plus, the actual number of completed applications do serve a legitimate purpose as well (for instance, we know that as of 11/02 there were an additional 900,000 applications in the hopper, ready for plan selection).
However, with the release of the official enrollment numbers for the first 33 days (10/1 - 11/2), it seems a bit pointless to continue with the applications as well. Therefore, I'm making a major change to the spreadsheet.
As everyone knows by now, the official enrollment figure--as of November 2nd--was about 106,000 (plus another 392,000 added to Medicaid).
Well, there's something important to remember--things have started to ramp up since the crappy first month. The HC.gov site may still be having problems, but most of the state exchanges have worked theirs out, and California is starting to get things in gear:
More than 59,000 Californians have signed up for coverage since the state launched its health insurance marketplace last month, but the figures showed a significant uptick in activity in the first two weeks of November, officials said Wednesday.
The Obama administration will on Wednesday release data on October enrollments through the federal health insurance exchange.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will release a report on the numbers at 3:30 p.m., and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius will discuss the findings on a press call then. The numbers are for people living in states using the federal exchange and not state exchanges, which have slowly been releasing their data.
The White House has been trying to lower already low expectations for the numbers, as press secretary Jay Carney did, yet again, at his daily briefing Wednesday. "No one will be satisfied with the numbers because they will be below what we sought" prior to the launch of the website, he told reporters.
Carney said he hadn't yet discussed the numbers with Obama.
So far, private health plans have received enrollment data for 40,000 to 50,000 users of the federal marketplace, the people familiar with the figures said.
The figure of 40,000 to 50,000 doesn't include people in the 36 states who used the federal website to learn they qualify for Medicaid, a federal-state health program for low-income people. Medicaid is being expanded in many of the 36 states.
