After last week's confusing numbers, Minnesota is back on track with private exchange enrollments increasing by 6,440 over a week earlier, or 33%. Enrollment in MinnesotaCare and Medical Assistance went up to 15,997 and 25,948 respectively.
MNsure got through the first round of customer sign-ups, which had a Dec. 31 deadline. On Friday the agency reported that 67,805 Minnesotans had used the site to enroll in a health plan by year’s end. Some 25,860 consumers bought an individual plan on the commercial market, with the rest eligible for one of the publicly subsidized programs.MNsure said that 14,600 people signed up in the last four days of December, a last-minute burst that Leitz described as “an encouraging sign.”
Last night I teased that I'd be providing some context and insight into the Iowa and Nebraska updates posted on the spreadsheet, and I still plan on doing so later today. However, there's been an interesting development over at Minnesota which I need to address first.
Yesterday, Jackie Crosby of the Minnesota StarTribune posted "MNsure grids for late crush of enrollees", which among other things gave an update on the MNsure enrollment numbers, stating:
More than 53,000 Minnesotans have bought coverage as of last Friday, with the biggest gains coming from those buying private health plans on the individual market. By Friday, 19,420 had signed up for individual or family plans; 12,051 had been enrolled in Medical Assistance; and 12,708 were getting coverage through MinnesotaCare.
So far, fair enough. However, in the original version of the article posted yesterday, there were two more paragraphs immediately following this. The first paragraph specified that these enrollments actually represented about 125,000 actual people (i.e., additional family members, etc). It also specified that about 20,000 of those were being held up due to paperwork issues and so forth. The next paragraph stated that around 3,900 people had completed enrollment but hadn't actually paid their first premiums yet.
Yesterday morning's big news, of course, was that the Federal ACA exchange (covering 36 states) is now up to over 1.1 million private healthcare plan enrollees. Today brings 4 new state-level updates...and a teaser for two others you probably weren't expecting to see.
New York:
Today's big news is in New York,which announced that they're up to a total of 241,522 enrollees in either private plans or Medicaid/SCHIP expansion. They haven't broken out the number yet, but based on the split in the previous update (156K private, 58K Medicaid/SCHIP) I'm going with a 73% private / 27% Medicaid split until more specific info is released. This increases NY's private enrollments to 176K, up 20K from last week. h/t to Buenaventura for being the first to notify me.
Connecticut:
Connecticut issued a formal press release which includes their final 12/23 deadline enrollment tally for 1/1/14 plan coverage. The total is only slightly higher than what I had (34,295 instead of 34,000 even); the noteworthy part of the announcement is that they've confirmed ACASignups.net's declaration of CT as the first state to surpass their original CBO enrollment projection. CBO had them achieving 33,000 private enrollments by 3/31/14; instead they've managed to break through that number in less than half the 6-month enrollment period. Given the poor October performance of the ACA exchanges as a whole, this is an amazing development.
