Connecticut: Effectuated QHP enrollment only down 9% from OE3; 100 SEPs/day

Thu, 04/21/2016 - 9:48am

The go-to journalist in Connecticut for all things Obamacare-related is Arielle Levin Becker. Judging from her feed this AM, it sounds like she's livetweeting the monthly AccessHealthCT board meeting. Here's her key points:

CT exchange enrollment down about 9.2 percent from end of open enrollment. Also about 2% shift from subsidized to unsubsidized.

— Arielle Levin Becker (@ariellelb) April 21, 2016

CT exchange getting about 3,100 enrollments through special enrollment periods each month.

— Arielle Levin Becker (@ariellelb) April 21, 2016

Out of 116k members at end of open enrollment, 18.8k canceled covg or had it terminated; 7,983 people have signed up.

— Arielle Levin Becker (@ariellelb) April 21, 2016

Of exchange custs who lost coverage, 20% failed to verify info, 53% didn't pay, 10% requested their plans be canceled. 12% moved to Medicaid

— Arielle Levin Becker (@ariellelb) April 21, 2016

Biggest reason people sign up thru exchange outside open enrollment: loss of coverage (82%). But so far, exchange hasn't verified

— Arielle Levin Becker (@ariellelb) April 21, 2016

37% of those who signed up thru exchange outside open enrollment period previously had Medicaid.

— Arielle Levin Becker (@ariellelb) April 21, 2016

@charles_gaba Not sure. Overall enrollee figure (105k) from 4/18

— Arielle Levin Becker (@ariellelb) April 21, 2016

Like MNsure's (Minnesota) monthly report, there's some interseting, and potentially positive news here:

  • This year they're down only 9.2% (from 116,019 to around 105.3K) over 77 days from 2/01/16 - 4/18/16.
  • This, along with Minnesota's numbers (which actually increased since the end of open enrollment), suggests that the retention rate might be better this year than last nationally,
  • 53% non-payments out of 18,800 is 9,964. That means that out of 116,019 open enrollment selections, Connecticut has a 91.4% payment rate, which is higher than the 90% national average I've been assuming.
  • Once you subtract out those who simply don't pay up (and therefore don't really count in the first place), CT has only had a net "loss" of around 800 people, or less than 1%, due to other factors.
  • On the other hand, 20% info verification failures actually = around 3,760, or 3.2% of total selections. That would potentially extrapolate out to 410,000 nationally, although CMS "pre-purged" around 300,000 people from the HC.gov states due to a combination of non-payment and information verification issues, so it's possible that the bulk of these cancellations are already accounted for. If so, the official Q1 2016 report might only show perhaps 200K "data verification" cancellations total.
  • 12% moving to Medicaid out of 18,800 is around 2,256 people. 37% moving from Medicaid out of 7,983 is around 2,954 people. In other words, while there was a net drop overall, the exchange is actually gaining more people "upgrading" from Medicaid than they're losing to it.
  • 3,100 SEP enrollees per month is roughly 100 per day. Extrapolated out based on CT's proportion of the 12.7 million people who selected policies during open enrollment nationally, this suggests roughly 338,000 off-season QHP selections per month, or around 11,300/day, which would also be higher than the 8,300/day or so which was typical in both 2014 and 2015.
  • Minnesota, by comparison, has had 5,306 SEP enrollments from 2/02 - 4/17, or 70 per day on average (2,100/month). Again, extrapolated nationally, that would work out to around 319,000 per month nationally, or 10,600/day.

UPDATE: Between the two, this suggests perhaps 11,000 off-season SEP selections per day...but bear in mind that these two states combined only make up around 1.6% of all exchange QHP enrollees, and this is only for about 2 1/2 months of the off-season. Other states could have higher or lower SEP rates, and the overall SEP rate could change dramatically as we head into summer/fall.

Connecticut

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