As I noted last week, Your Health Idaho has released their final official OE3 number. I had previously noted that there were only 8 states in which the exchanges appeared to have performed worse on private policy enrollment in 2016 than they did in 2015, and that most of those had special circumstances:
So, last year, after getting a chuckle out someone snapping up TedCruz.com and posting a pro-immigration reform message on it, I snapped up a few other variables which Senator Maple Leaf missed, such as TedCrooz.com, TedCruise.com and so forth. I figured I'd get a handful of visits from people misspelling his name, but I also kind of assumed that those people would instantly realize their error, seeing how the moment the site loads, it's pretty obvious that not only is this not Ted Cruz's campaign website, the whole site is the complete opposite of everything Cruz-ish...especially in regards to the Affordable Care Act.
Apparently I was wrong. It never fails to amaze me how utterly oblivious some people supporters are to the websites they're visiting. Check out the most recent missive I received over the weekend:
Every year, at least since the ACA exchanges went into effect, insurers have been required to submit their plans and premium rates for the upcoming year to state or federal regulators months ahead of time, in order to allow time to review, modify and approve rates. Once Open Enrollment begins, it was my understanding that the specifics of the plans offered are supposed to be locked in for the full calendar year. In other words, no bait & switching allowed: If a certain plan was set to cost someone $300/month with a $2,000 deductible, 70% actuarial value, such-and-such co-pays and so forth, they aren't allowed to change those plan specs once the Open Enrollment Period begins, and they're required to stick to those prices and coverage specifics for the full upcoming year.
For months now, several large insurance carriers (especially the biggest of them, UnitedHealthcare) have been griping about losing money hand over fist on the ACA exchanges, and yes, that's probably true (although other carriers are making money, albeit not as many and not as much as the losses).
That's 300 more people who signed up for QHPs in the first 2 weeks of the off-season, plus another 6,500 added to MinnesotaCare and over 17,000 added to Medicaid (both of which are year round).
The QHP number (just 21 per day) is kind of interesting when compared to Rhode Island, which has has averaged 90 additional people per day in the first 2 weeks of February, yet has a population only 1/5th the size of Minnesota's. When adjusted for total population, Rhode Island's off-season rate is over 21x that of Minnesota.
The big difference, of course, is that Minnesota's BHP program (MinnesotaCare) cannibalizes the QHP market tremendously. When you add those 6,500 to the mix, MNsure has averaged 485 per day...or slightly higher than Rhode Island when adjusted for inflation (around 97/day when divided by 5).
... all young people in Flint the chance to receive publicly funded health care services for lead exposure amid the city's contaminated drinking water crisis.
...The White House and federal Department of Health and Human Services did not have an immediate response Tuesday to Snyder's initiative targeting Flint residents up to age 21 through the expansion of Medicaid.
Specifically, the initiative, which is expected to be sent to the Obama administration in the next week, seeks expanding Medicaid eligibility to those affected regardless of income level. The request would also include the expansion of Medicaid coverage for people already enrolled in other forms of insurance.
Covered California held a press call a few minutes ago in which they released detailed enrollment numbers for the 2016 Open Enrollment Period, broken down a number of different ways, including by rate region and individual carrier market share. They even broke the individual numbers out between renewals and new enrollees.
Unfortunately, I only caught half the call, but the full press release should be coming out momentarily which is supposed to have all of the numbers broken out every which way.
Until then, here are some oddball key points from the call:
The final 2016 Open Enrollment Period exchange-based QHP selection numbers have been posted for just about every state for a couple of weeks now...but until today, there were still 3 states with missing data: Idaho, New York and Vermont.
Unfortunately, both NY and VT are still AWOL, but moments ago Idaho scratched itself off the list with the following press release:
Your Health Idaho Reaches Record Enrollment
Idaho has second largest per capita enrollment in the U.S.
BOISE, Idaho – Your Health Idaho today announced that 102,353 Idahoans have enrolled in Qualified Health Plans for 2016 through the state’s health exchange.
Idaho had just over 97,000 QHP selections last year, so this is about a 5% increase. Not fantastic, but not terrible; this puts ID in between Kansas and New Mexico in terms of year over year enrollment increases.
In any event, I can at least plug in one more data point.
OK, that was possibly the worst headline I've ever written.
So, the insurance carriers have been getting the vapors of late because they're absolutely certain that uninsured off-season Special Enrollment Period (SEP) enrollees are gaming the system, taking advantage of the poor multi-billion dollar insurance carriers' hearts by tracking down the list of Qualifying Life Events (QLEs), shoehorning themselves in so that they're eligible for one of them (or simply lying about having one), signing up for coverage during the off-season, racking up gobs of expensive medical procedures and then kicking the policy to the curb without so much as a promise to call them the next day.
I've already discussed this issue ad nauseum, including point/counterpoints with folks like Richard Mayhew of Balloon Juice, Michael Hiltzik of the L.A. Times and Michael "King v. Burwell" Cannon of the CATO Institute.
My takeaway is that yes, people "gaming" the system probably is happening to some extent, but that there are some fairly simple steps which can be taken to prevent this (or at least to reduce it considerably).
Better yet, they're also making sure to include both the gross enrollment and net effectuated enrollment numbers. If every state exchange (and especially HealthCare.Gov, of course) were to do this, I'd be a very happy man indeed. In the meantime, I'll have to settle for RI's regular updates, although extrapolating anything nationally from a single state with just over 1 million people is a bit tricky.
