UPDATED 3/20/15: Yay! The HHS Dept. has confirmed that yes, they'll release "some enrollment data" the week of March 23rd...but it's still not a full response; see my post about it.
Dear Andy Slavitt, Kevin Counihan and Sec. Burwell:
Don't get me wrong, I was thrilled when you started breaking HC.gov enrollments down weekly, and was especially happy when the state-by-state breakdowns were provided! Awesome! That's the main reason I started this project in the first place, because of the lack of data transparency during the 2014 enrollment period!
We're in a bit of an in-between phase this week. Open Enrollment is officially over, and the Tax Season special enrollment period doesn't start until Sunday in most states.
However, the Massachusetts Health Connector has provided me with a handy report which gives some interesting drill-down data. Most of it is stuff I don't really track anyway, but some of it I do and the rest may be of interest to some. I'm only focusing on a few items, the PDF itself has a bunch more:
CLARIFICATION 3/15/15: No, I don't have any hard proof that anyone has done this or that anyone will do so. For all I know, not a single person has done this. I'm just saying that it's a) easy to do, b) perfectly legal (how do you know for certain what your expected income will be in the future?) and furthermore, c) not unethical, as you'd have to be in pretty dire straits to do this, as shown below.
There's not a huge amount of position shifting here (other than Hawaii), but with today's final official ASPE enrollment report for 2015 Open Enrollment having been released, it seems appropriate to do this one more time:
2015 vs. 2014:
The biggest change here is that Hawaii is no longer near the top of the list due to the confusing report from the HI exchange a few weeks back. Otherwise, aside from Massachusetts (special case) and Maryland (these are the only 2 exchanges to overhaul their prior tech platform with new ones while remaining self-contained), DC is the only "state" exchange in the top third. The other state exchanges are all down at the bottom.
Why? Two reasons: First, 3 of the states (CO, RI & WA) are only listing paid enrollments (or at least are purging past-due unpaid selections before submitting their data to HHS). Secondly, because HC.gov has simply caught up this year after being smoked the last time around.
HAWAII: I was assured 8 ways from Sunday that Hawaii's23,000 enrollee figure was specifically for 2015 enrollment. This made no sense to me given their tiny enrollment last year, but I was assured of it. Well, apparently my original instincts were correct, because they're showing up with only 12,625 in the end.
IDAHO: This is the only state which hasn't given their own enrollment update in forever. According to the prior ASPE report, they were at around 90.5K as of January 17th...yet somehow they only managed to rack up another 6,500 enrollees over the entire final month of Open Enrollment?? I was expecting upwards of 30K or so. This makes zero sense to me...am I missing something here?
In addition, there are a few states where their most recent official enrollment reports had some confusing data, which the ASPE report pretty much trumps regardless of anything else (at least, this is the official number which will be tossed around no matter what anyway):
Pennsylvania's newly elected Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf is working with the federal government to set up a state-based insurance exchange, but GOP-controlled state Legislature would need to approve any funding.
Gov. Rick Snyder said Monday he would ask the Republican-controlled Legislature to create a state-run health exchange if a key part of the Affordable Care Act does not survive a legal challenge.
There was a lot of fuss yesterday about the new CBO report which now projects ACA federal tax credits to end up costing about 20% less than previously estimated over the next decade. This is great news, although the reasons for it can be seen as either good or bad depending on your POV:
The Congressional Budget Office previously projected that 12 million people would be covered by insurance policies obtained via an exchange this year. But it has reduced that prediction to 11 million, in part based on the expectation that a significant number of enrollees will give up this coverage, either to obtain insurance elsewhere or to become uninsured.
Over the past few years, there's been what seems to be a huge increase in incidents of police officers harrassing, arresting, beating up, tasing and/or flat-out shooting black people (and, admittedly, the occasional mentally-troubled white person, as if that makes the situation any better) for no particular reason. Michael Brown. Tamir Rice. John Crawford III. Eric Garner. The list goes on and on.
Anyway. My mom and stepfather are snowbirds, spending the winter in a condo down south. My mom called me this afternoon because she had received a call from the alarm company: The alarm at their house in Michigan had gone off, the police had been notified and were en route to check it out. I know the alarm code and have a spare key, so she needed me to swing by to disable the alarm and see what was going on.
2015 vs. 2014:
