As I noted after the 11/26 data was released, some key notes:
Most states are as of 12/10/16 (officially the end of the 6th week, even though it's "short" 2 days due to November starting on a Tuesday this year)
The red vertical line is where I expected each state to be as of 12/10/16...around 38% of where I project their final projected enrollments to be as of 1/31/17
For purposes of this graph, I'm defining "ahead" or "behind" as being plus or minus 2 percentage points.
South Dakota, Hawaii, Minnesota, Utah, Nebraska, Oregon, Wyoming, Wisconsin, Florida, Kansas, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Montana and Alabama are significantly ahead of where I expected them to be at this point.
On the other hand, New Hampshire, Michigan, Alaska, Georgia, Indiana, Texas, Arkansas, Colorado, Mississippi and especially Louisiana are all significantly behind so far.
Just a couple of days ago, MNsure reported 41,882 QHP selections as of December 11th (there was some confusion about the date but I've since confirmed this).
Today they've updated that to tack on another 14,000 new QHPs yesterday alone, bringing the grand total up to around 1,353,000 to date:
Covered California Extends Enrollment Deadline as Consumer Interest Continues to Grow
Consumers now have until midnight on Dec. 17 to sign up for health care coverage that will begin on Jan. 1.
More than 25,000 new consumers selected a plan during the past two days, which is more than enrolled at this time last year.
Open-enrollment plan selections continue to surge ahead of last year’s pace.
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Thanks to a strong increase in demand, Covered California is giving consumers more time to sign up for health coverage that will start on Jan. 1.
...There's a simple reason for this: When I whipped up this year's Graph, I forgot to take into account that November 1st fell on a Tuesday this year instead of a Sunday. Since enrollments tend to drop off substantially on weekends, this means that the slowdown comes 2 days earlier each week. For most weeks this is barely visible on the Graph, but this week in particular it can make a huge difference...up to a couple hundred thousand people per day.
In addition, normally CMS officially adds several million auto-renewals in a big lump sum around December 17-18th. Since those dates also fall over the weekend this year, I'm assuming they'll all be plugged in at once on Monday the 19th, resulting in an even more dramatic vertical line shooting up on that date.
With these tweaks in mind, here's what The Graph now looks like. Again, I haven't changed my key deadline projections, just the day-to-day flow within the current week or so.
I don't write about dental plan coverage very often; the only time I've ever really talked about it at length was my angry rant at the HHS Dept. on November 20, 2014 after it was discovered that someone at HHS/CMS screwed up royally by mistakenly lumping in several hundred thousand standalone dental plan enrollments with the full Qualified Health Plan enrollments, falsely making it look like the effectuated enrollment was around 7.3 million people as of August when in fact the number had fallen below the 7.0 million mark.
Otherwise, I don't really talk about dental plans much. There's actually two ways people can sign up for dental plans via the ACA exchanges: Either as "enhanced" QHPs (ie, full healthcare policies which also bundle dental coverage with them...which all of them really should IMHO, seeing how your teeth and gums are part of your body, after all), or as separate, standalone plans which are optional (that is, you don't have to have dental coverage in order to meet the ACA's Individual Mandate requirement).
IMPORTANT: I cannot guarantee accurate federal data after 1/20/17.
...HOWEVER, their bosses...the HHS Secretary and, I presume, the head of CMS...will be appointed by Donald J. Trump and confirmed by a 100% Republican-controlled Senate.
Given Trump's long, disturbing history of flat-out misstatements (aka "making sh*t up out of whole cloth"), and the type of sycophants he's likely to put into place, I can't guarantee with 100% certainty that the numbers spouted off by them are going to bear any connection with reality. Maybe they'll be accurate. Maybe they'll be off slightly. Maybe they'll be completely removed from any actual numbers. Who the hell knows?
Earlier today it was reported that Ben Carson was being considered for HHS Secretary. Then the rumor mill turned to Bobby Jindal. At the moment, I'm hearing it could be Rep. Tom Price, who (like pretty much every other GOP member of Congress) despises the ACA. That doesn't guarantee that he'll Make Sh*t Up, of course, but under a Trump regime, anything's possible. Anything.
“The deadline to have coverage starting the first of the year is this week,” said CEO Wadleigh. “We’re seeing huge numbers of people enrolling – which is amazing. We want people to have coverage, that’s for sure. But what we want most of all is for Connecticut to be healthy. We’re on the right track – we’ve seen over 16,000 people sign up for 2017 coverage since November 1st.”
Covered California, the largest state-based ACA exchange (making up over 12% of national exchange QHP enrollments) has only posted one enrollment report so far this period. At the time, they reported 308,000 QHP selections, of which 263,462 were active renewals by existing enrollees and 44,885 were new enrollees signing up. This was as of November 15th...15 days into the enrollment period.
On the one hand, only 14.5% of these are new, which is disturbingly low. On the other hand, part of the reason for this is because so many current enrollees actively renewed...helped, no doubt, by CoveredCA's new policy which allowed them to do so an entire month early (starting on October 1st).
