Connecticut: @AccessHealthCT reports 95,230 QHPs thru 12/11

Access Health CT, Connecticut's ACA exchange, is posting updates to their Open Enrollment Period (OEP) numbers every Friday. Last week they reported 91,965 Qualified Health Plan (QHP) selections during the first 34 days of the 2021 OEP, which sounds more impressive than it is, since most of those were current enrollees having their auto-renewals front-loaded; only 7,500 of them were actually new enrollees. Nothing wrong with that, of course.

This week, they report that they have 95,230 total QHP selections, of which 9,959 are new.

I'm pretty sure the reason for the discrepancy is that, like some other state-based exchanges, AccessHealthCT front-loads auto-renewals of all of their current enrollees, then allows them to actively go in and manually cancel their renewals. So, if they have 100K enrolled this year, they'd plug all of them in for 2021, then wait and see how many choose not to stay enrolled for 2021.

As far as I can tell, 85,271 of these are renewals by curren enrollees, while 9,959 are new. I could be wrong about this, however; as I noted a few weeks ago, AHCT's reporting methodology doesn't seem to match up with their monthly board meeting slideshow:

Over 111k with coverage extended through January. High volume of projections for renewal planned to begin in December.

Verification requirements extensions continue for enrollees for the duration of the PHE. Additional wave of communications to motivate completion of open items in progress.

Planning underway to prepare for 2021 updates on income reporting guidance and future efforts to decommission extension changes.

Enrollment: To date, 11k enrollees purchased a 2021 policy. 86k yet to be renewed (Report results as of 11/16/2020)

Upcoming: 75k enrollees scheduled to automatically renew into a 2021 policy. Estimated to be complete by Nov. 25.

Huh. Not quite sure how to square this with the numbers they reported today.