Happy 12th Birthday #ACA: CMS releases final 2022 OEP report (part 2)

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.

The next two tables look at the number of renewing enrollees who kept their existing (2021) ACA exchange policy vs. those who switched to a different policy for 2022. It's important to note that CMS only has data on this from the 33 states hosted on the federal exchange (HealthCare.Gov).

Of those, over 56% of renewing enrollees switched to a different policy (either through the same carrier or a different one). The other 44% either kept whatever policy they were enrolled in at the end of 2021 or were automatically switched to the closest equivalent in cases where that exact policy had been discontinued by the insurance carrier (this is known as being "crosswalked"):

The next table breaks out the actual applications submitted to the various ACA exchanges. Remember, anyone can set up an account and apply for healthcare coverage, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're eligible to enroll. Undocumented immigrants can't enroll in ACA exchange coverage, for instance, even without subsidies. There are also probably some cases where two members of the same household may have inadvertently submitted an application, and so on.

Nationally, over 25.8 million individuals were listed on applications submitted during 2022 OEP; of those, around 17.5 million were determined eligible to actually enroll in an ACA exchange plan, plus over 3.17 million who were deterimined to be eligible for Medicaid or the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) instead.

Note that the Medicaid/CHIP total is actually missing 4 states, including two pretty big ones (CA, CO, ID & NY), which means the gap between the number who applied (25.83 million) and the number eligible (20.67 million) is actually much smaller than it appears:

What's amazing about the Medicaid/CHIP determination column is that the state-based exchange (SBE) total is nearly 3.3x higher than the federal exchange total even without those four states included!