NOTE: Today is October 1st, 2016, the 3rd anniversary of the disastrous launch of HealthCare.Gov. To mark the occasion, I'm dusting off this post from last December.
There were a lot of numbers tossed around in today's big HealthCare.Gov enrollment news, but I want to focus on just one number in particular:
600,000.
Six hundred thousand people actively enrolled in private healthcare policies on Tuesday, December 15, 2015 by using HealthCare.Gov.
Forget about the cumulative total for a moment. Forget about the auto-renewals still to be added. Forget about the state-based exchanges. Just focus on the fact that in a single 24-hour period, 600,000 people signed up through the federal exchange site only.
Now think back to October 2013, when HC.gov and 17 state-based exchange websites launched...and, for the most part, immediately crashed and burned.
BOISE, Idaho – Since Open Enrollment began on November 1, over 93,000 Idahoans have selected a health insurance plan for 2016 through Your Health Idaho. Approximately 86,000 Idahoans are currently enrolled for 2015 coverage.
“We are pleased to see an increase in enrollments at this half-way mark,” said Your Health Idaho executive director, Pat Kelly. “This demonstrates there is a continued need for access to affordable healthcare in Idaho. The good news is that Idahoans who remain uninsured still have until January 31 to enroll for health and dental coverage. But we encourage people to act now.” Idahoans who complete an application between now and January 31 will have coverage as early as February.
Idahoans who need assistance picking a health insurance plan can find a local agent or broker in their community to help them free of charge by visiting www.YourHealthIdaho.org and clicking on “find help near you.”
Remember that HC.gov generally represents about 3/4 of national enrollments, so for Wednesday and Thursday, I assumed around 300K active selections per day for the federal exchange.
OK, this is a bit of a downer on an otherwise extremely positive day, but given my recent obsession with trying to track down the number of people still currently enrolled in effectuated policies for 2015, it seems worth making note of.
Remember, the official exchange effectuation figure as of 6/30/15 was 9.95 million people.
Back in early November, I cobbled together the effectuated enrollment data from 8 different state-based exchanges, and concluded that the numbers stayed relatively from the end of June through the end of September. With Massachusetts included, the numbers were actually higher, and even without MA included (special case) it was only down a nominal amount. With only 8 states representing a small percentage of the national population, however, there was no way of knowing how representative this was.
Just to clarify, I fully realize that Disney/LucasFilm would've had to agree to such an official ad campaign.
I'm assuming that it's OK for me to do this under parody/fair use.
Images will be removed if requested. Please don't sue.
DENVER (AP) – A new insurance-matching tool similar to Uber car sharing is helping Colorado’s health insurance exchange meet demand during the open enrollment period for people who need to sign up for health coverage , an exchange official said Thursday.
And an extended deadline didn’t hurt.
Open enrollment ends in January for Connect For Health Colorado. But Thursday was the deadline for shoppers to have coverage in effect by Jan. 1.
More than 117,000 people had signed up, though exact figures weren’t available, said Connect For Health spokesman Luke Clarke.
Connect for Health wants to see 217,000 people signed up by next summer. Clarke said the exchange is ahead of last year’s pace, when 113,000 had signed up by the December deadline.
The article doesn't specify what the "thru date" for the 117K figure is, but I'm assuming that it was as of 12/15 since that was the original deadline for January coverage and the story ran today.
The problem was that if CMS didn't approve the waiver, the entire program would be shut down, kicking some 600,000 Michiganders off their healthcare coverage next April.
Thanks to Richard Mayhew for calling my attention to this item. He titled his piece "Technically True Bullshit", and while I tried to come up with a more clever (clever-er?) title, I couldn't do it.
In other words, like Massachusetts, Maryland has already hit the target for the 2016 Open Enrollment just halfway through the period. The difference is that Massachusetts never really issued their own formal target (well, OK, technically Maryland needs 235 more people...)
The Affordable Care Act’s third open enrollment period will end on Jan. 31, but the latest Kaiser Health Tracking Poll finds that only a small share of people without health insurance realize it.
Just 7 percent of the uninsured correctly identify January as the deadline to enroll; another 20 percent say the deadline is at the end of 2015, while everyone else either says they don’t know, gives another date or says the deadline has already passed.
