...as I noted last week, there's a huge difference between what the insurance companies are asking for and what they actually get approved. As noted in the article CNY article:
Last year, insurers requested 9.5 percent increases in premiums for their individual plans, but the state Department of Financial Services, which regulates insurers, approved, on average, only a 4.5 percent increase.
Usually I'm able to track down my data either by myself or with the help of several people who send me data links on a fairly regular basis. This has resulted in my being able to fill in off-season QHP enrollment data for almost 20 states.
However, there are several states whose data has eluded me so far...and unfortunately, this includes the two largest state-run exchanges: California and New York. I've contacted both exchanges; CoveredCA told me that updated enrollment numbers would be released "soon" but that was a good month ago. The New York State of Health exchange flatly stated that they, like HHS, would not be giving out any sort of official off-season enrollment update. There's also the Rhode Island exchange, which hasn't responded to my requests at all. (Update: Never mind that last one; just heard directly from the RI exchange, hopefully they'll be able to provide an update soon...)
A week or so ago, I posted an entry about the requested rate changes for 2015 from the insurance companies operating on the New York exchange (I'm emphasizing "requested" since, again, those changes still have to be approved by state regulators, who have already lopped the average increases down dramatically in both Rhode Island and Connecticut, and I just announced that CA kept them to a quite reasonable 4.3% (weighted) average). The overall unweighted average requested change in New York appeared to be 14.6% increase, which isn't good news at all.
Thanks to contributor Bob H., however, for not only crunching the numbers to give the properly weighted average increase, but also for noting that it turns out that the number of companies listed in the original report (a whopping 42 of them) is slightly overstated, to put it mildly. You see, it turns out that, according to Bob...
With all my stories about the requested premium increases in various states not living up to the "sky is falling" hype, several people have called attention to the fact that in New York State, it's not looking good:
ALBANY—New York insurance companies are looking to raise health insurance premiums by an average of 13 percent, according to proposed rates released by the state's Department of Financial Services on Wednesday.
The requests come from the 41 insurance companies operating in New York's insurance market. Last year, 16 insurers offered plans on the state's health exchange, which was created by the Affordable Care Act.
The six most popular plans on the state’s exchange requested double-digit increases in their premium rates for next year, with an average request of a 14.6 percent rate hike.
Visit the link for a pretty cool rollover county-by-county map showing ACA exchange enrollments in New York State:
Last week, the state's health department released demographic information on who used New York's new health insurance exchange to enroll in a health insurance plan.
The data showed how many people across New York signed up for private health insurance plans, enrolled in Medicaid and took advantage of Children's Health Plus.
In total, nearly 1 million people got health insurance coverage through New York State of Health, or about 5 percent of the state's population. The exchanges were created by the Affordable Care Act.
Capital broke that down by county: We found Queens County had the highest percentage (6.78) of its population enroll while Madison County (2.86) had the lowest. But in Madison about half the people who enrolled signed up for a Medicaid plan while half signed up for private insurance. In Queens, twice as many people signed up for Medicaid compared to a private insurance plan.
I contacted the NY State of Health exchange a couple of weeks back and spoke a couple of times with a very nice media relations woman who explained that yes, a highly-detailed, comprehensive enrollment report would be released sometime in late June, but that no, it wouldn't include any information about exchange enrollment since the end of the first Open Enrollment period (ie, the extension period which ended on April 15th).
She said that she'd see about trying to get "off season" enrollment data back on the agenda, but just like the HHS Dept. running 36 other states, it looks like NY has decided not to bother. This leaves me crossing my fingers that California will release their off-season data sometime soon; since CA handles almost 20% of the total enrollments by itself, that (combined with the other half-dozen state exchanges providing regular updates) should be enough to extrapolate for the rest of the country. NY is the 2nd largest exchange, however, so it would've been helpful if they'd done so as well.
As I noted yesterday, there are three states which had unusually large discrepancies between the official HHS and state exchange QHP enrollments:
New York came in over 65,000 lower than the number I had for a simple reason: The New York exchange lumps enrollees in their Child Health Plus program in with QHPs, even though technically this isn't a QHP program. There were over 40,000 of these as of the end of February; this number has climbed to 65,028 as of 4/19.
Since Child Health Plus is privately funded (and therefore isn't on the Medicaid/CHIP side), but also isn't officially a QHP either according to HHS, I've moved it over to the "Off Exchange QHP" column.
This is actually pretty impressive; NY had been averaging around 4,200/day up until yesterday, when they hit 949,428, so this means they racked up another 11,334 in the final day (around 5,600 QHPs and 5,700 Medicaid):
No breakout between Private QHPs & Medicaid/CHIP yet, but NY State of Health just issued this press release:
ALBANY, NY (April 15, 2014) – NY State of Health (NYSOH), the State’s official health plan marketplace, reported that as of 9 a.m. today, 1,311,271 New Yorkers have completed their applications and 949,428 have enrolled for coverage since the launch of the Marketplace on October 1, 2013. More than 70 percent of those who have enrolled to date were uninsured at the time of application. The Marketplace is well on its way to meeting or exceeding its enrollment goal of 1.1 million people by the end of 2016.
This figure is about 16,200 higher than just 4 days ago, meaning NY is averaging around 4K/day. Assuming no final day spike (or drop-off), their final total should come in at around 954,000 people.
Not gonna update the spreadsheet or graph until I get the actual QHP/Medicaid breakout, however, since those are almost always provided within a few hours of the combined number in NY.
