Happy 12th Birthday #ACA: CMS releases final 2022 OEP report (part 1)

As I just noted, today marks the 12th Anniversary of President Obama signing the ACA into law. To mark the occasion, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has released the final, official 2022 Open Enrollment Period (OEP) report, which I'll be breaking into several entries.

First up is the top line numbers: Just how many people selected Qualified Health Plans (QHPs) during the 2022 OEP, which ran from November 1st, 2021 through different ending dates depending on the state. In the 33 states hosted via the federal ACA exchange (HealthCare.Gov), as well as 9 of the 18 state-based marketplaces (SBMs), the ending date was January 15th, 2022.

For the remaining SBMs, the ending date was: 12/22/21 in Idaho; 1/19/22 in Colorado; 1/28/22 in Massachusetts; 1/31/22 in DC, Kentucky, New Jersey, New York & Rhode Island; and 2/04/22 in California:

The official grand total is 14,511,077, which is slightly higher than the 14,502,111 I previously had tallied; the discrepancy is caused by some straggler enrollees being added in a handful of SBM states in the final days of OEP which hadn't been reported yet.

As a reminder, here's how each state compares vs. the official 2021 OEP. I've also included the Basic Health Plan (BHP) program enrollees in Minnesota & New York, and have also broken year over year enrollment out by Medicaid expansion status:

*Missouri and Oklahoma both expanded Medicaid mid-year in 2021; **Wisconsin hasn't fully expanded Medicaid under the ACA but did partially expand it up to 100% of the Federal Poverty Level years ago, so there's technically no Medicaid Gap in that state.

Here's what this looks like visually compared to last year (dotted lines):