Connecticut: QHP enrollment at 76.1K; Medicaid up to 207K

Arielle Levin Becker provides some updated numbers out of Connecticut, which is great...but I'll have to do some calculations to parse the data out for my purposes:

Current Access Health membership: 76,094 in private insurance, 207,020 in Medicaid (total Medicaid enrollment is much higher)

— Arielle Levin Becker (@ariellelb) September 18, 2014

OK, so those are the current enrollment numbers. 76,094 QHPs is 4% net attrition from the 4/19 total of 79,192, or less than 0.8% per month, which is fantastic.

However, since that 76K figure combines both additions and subtractions (ie, it's the net total, not gross), I can't really tell what the cumulative total is, which is what I use for my off-season projection chart.

So, going back to the prior update from AccessHealth CT, in which the combined total was given as 250,633 as of 8/02. At the time I estimated the breakout to be roughly 87K QHPs and 164K Medicaid...but this assumed a 24/76 split between the two for the 32,533 total enrollees since 4/19, giving a total ratio of 35/65 at that time.

However, the actual current ratio is 27/73, suggesting that off-season QHP enrollments haven't been nearly as high in Connecticut as I thought. On the other hand, ironically, the lower the cumulative total, the better this makes the attrition rate.

Either way, the QHP attrition rate is very low (a good thing) and the Medicaid tally is impressive. In fact, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, Connecticut should only have around 107,000 uninsured residents eligible for expansion, suggesting that CT has not only enrolled pretty much everyone eligible, but has added a good 100K "woodworkers" as well...although some of those who enrolled via the exchange could be renewals of existing recipients as well.

Without knowing what the breakdown is of woodworkers vs. renewals, this is difficult to say (plus, KFF's 107K eligible estimate may be off?), but it certainly sounds like the vast majority of expansion eligible residents have been enrolled by now in Connecticut.

UPDATE: According to Becker, Connecticut's Medicaid-expansion eligible population has actually grown since the KFF report last fall and now stands at 163K...but she also says that the expansion pool itself grew by 68K since last fall. Since the 107K figure includes both "strict expansion" as well as "woodworkers", that suggests that the breakdown is something like:

• 163K eligible via expansion
• 12K eligible via being woodworkers

That still adds up to 175K vs. the 207K enrolled through the exchange. If the other 32,000 are all renewals, that still would mean that Connecticut has now enrolled almost 100% of all eligible Medicaid/CHIP enrollees by now.

My guess is that the 207K probably breaks down more like:

• 147K expansion eligible enrolled out of 163K total (90%)
• 10K woodworkers enrolled out of 12K total (83%)
• 50K renewals/redeterminations/etc.