OK, these weekly estimates of HC.gov QHP enrollments probably don't mean much now that we're out of the official enrollment period, but what the heck.
On Wednesday the HHS Dept. should release the first post-deadline enrollment report, which should run through Friday, February 20th. Assuming this is the case, I'm estimating that there should have been roughly 9.0 million QHP selections even. However, the last report stated that the roughly 200,000 people who are being kicked off of their policies due to problems with their legal residency verification will be removed "in future reports after their coverage ends on February 28."
That sounds like they'll probably be included in tomorrow's report (with a similar caveat/footnote), but subtracted after that. Assuming that they yank them tomorrow after all, the "official" QHP selection total should be more like 8.8 million.
Recently, the House Republicans sent an incredibly "CHOOTZ-PAH" filled letter to HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell in which they demanded that she tell them what the HHS Dept's "contingency plan" would be in the event that the Supreme Court ends up doing their bidding by tearing away federal tax credits from up to 7.8 million people this summer.
Today, Sec. Burwell responded in the only rational way possible: By pointing out that if they're absolutely determined to destroy the lives of millions of likely voters across 37 states (including swing states like Florida, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin) while simultaneously forcing insurance premiums up an additional 35% or more for everyone else in those states, when it would literally take about 5 minutes for them to "fix" the very issue that they ginned up as the "problem" in the first place, there's not a hell of a lot that she can do to stop them.
Remember last week when the HHS Dept. announced that someone had sent out 800,000 screwed-up 1095-A tax forms? Those are the ones that those receiving ACA tax credits have to fill out to make sure that they don't have to pay anything back (or, conversely, that the IRS doesn't owe them a higher subsidy).
Out of around 4 million of these forms sent out nationally, about 20% (800K) had some sort of error regarding the benchmark policy used to calculate their correct subsidy. Of those 800K, about 50,000 people had already filed their 2014 taxes before the error was found, and originally the Treasury Dept. had said that they were going to contact each of those 50K to resolve the issue.
WASHINGTON — Taxpayers who've filed their 2014 returns only to learn that the government provided them with erroneous information on health care subsidies won't be required to submit corrected returns, the Treasury Department said Tuesday.
Long-time readers know that I've been a little obsessed with the so-called "healthcare exchange" called Florida Health Choices since last August, having posted 3-4 entries on this huge pile of Republican FAIL since then.
The short version is that before he was elected a U.S. Senator, Marco Rubio, then a member of the Florida House of Representatives, convinced his colleagues in the Florida state legislature to pony up $900,000 of taxpayer money to set up their own "healthcare exchange" to show that Republicans can outdo the Democrats when it comes to selling health insurance online, dagnabbit! Once the ACA was signed into law, "Florida Health Choices" became essentially a protest project against the Evils of All Things Obamacare.
Of course, there were a few minor problems with "Florida Health Choices", Rubio's brainchild:
It's important to stress that this is not the final enrollment report for Massachusetts; it's the final daily report, which only includes the number of people determined eligible to purchase a private policy (Medicaid enrollees, however, are instant-activation; the number listed here is the number actually enrolled as of that day).
For most of the open enrollment period, QHP selections were running around 45-50% of the total QHP determinations; the other half are people who hadn't actually completed the process or who accidentally submitted 2 applications or whatever.
However, for the final week, it's pretty safe to assume that anyone who bothered to create an account, fill out their info and submit their application was pretty likely to actually put a policy in their shopping cart and check out (as well as paying their first premium on the spot), since yesterday was the (extended) deadline to do so. Therefore, it's a pretty safe bet that all 2,816 of those listed below (of the 7,057 total, which also includes MassHealth), at a minimum, can be added to the total.
However, the actual percentage drop nationally noted in the survey caught my eye. According to Gallup:
Nationwide, the uninsured rate dropped 3.5 percentage points last year, from 17.3% to 13.8%, the lowest annualized rate across the seven years of Well-Being Index measurement. No state reported a statistically significant increase in the percentage of uninsured in 2014 compared with 2013.
Yesterday, the New York Times posted an infographic depicting the breakout of insurance coverage for everyone in the country, based entirely on my data. The grand total of ACA-specific health insurance coverage topped out at around 31.4 million, but left out close to a million people due to rounding and to deliberately leaving out a few items (such as people enrolled in small business coverage via the SHOP exchanges, which I estimate to be around 220,000 people nationally).
The 51 states (including the District of Columbia) that provided enrollment data for December 2014 reported nearly 69.7 million individuals were enrolled in Medicaid and CHIP. This enrollment count is point-in-time (on the last day of the month) and includes all enrollees in the Medicaid and CHIP programs who are receiving a comprehensive benefit package.
547,263 additional people were enrolled in December 2014 as compared to November 2014 in the 51 states that reported comparable December and November data.
(And yes, the "51 states" wording is CMS's, not mine)
On Friday, the MA Health Connector confirmed 134,000 QHP selections out of 237,000 people determined eligible for QHPs as of 2/18. Since then they've added another 6,614 QHP determinations.
For most of the 2015 open enrollment period, the number of people actually selecting a plan has hovered between 45-50% of the total determinations. However, as of last Thursday it had shot up to over 56%, and given that today is the final day to enroll for most people, it's a pretty safe bet that anyone who has bothered going through the trouble of creating an account, logging in, plugging in all of their info and submitting an application is also going to complete the process by actually checking out a policy (and presumably paying their first premium, since today's the deadline for that as well).
Therefore, I'm pretty sure that the total is well above 140K by now, and likely somewhat higher than that (since that would still leave another 103,600 people who had previously submitted an application but not completed the process as well).
