D'oh! OK, one more late-breaking number today, out of Vermont:
Vermont Health Connect Open Enrollment and Renewal Update
The following numbers are up-to-date as of 11:59pm Monday, February 9, 2015.
New Vermont Health Connect Customers
12,344 individuals have checked out a 2015 health plan. This includes 4,786 individuals in Qualified Health Plans (private health insurance) and 7,558 individuals in Medicaid or Dr. Dynasaur plans.
After a new customer checks out a plan, they must make an initial premium payment and have their selection processed before they have an active health plan. Of the 12,344 individuals who checked out, 10,678 have completed the enrollment process and have an active health plan (i.e., effectuated enrollment). Of those who completed the process, 3,293 are on a Qualified Health Plan and 7,385 are on Medicaid or Dr. Dynasaur.
MA's number starts with the 119K confirmed as of last Thursday, then adds 50% of those determined eligible for QHPs since then (this has proven to be a pretty accurate rule of thumb to date).
RI actually provides the hard paid enrollment number, and even provides the total QHP selections...but only after having purged an estimated 1,800 or so who didn't pay by the due date. I'm glad that they're purging those folks, but it makes it a bit tricky since most other states are being based on their total selections, whether paid or not.
WA, like Rhode Island, provides the paid enrollment number, but doesn't provide total selections at all.
In the cases of RI & WA, I'm assuming that their hard paid number represents 88% of the total selections, which means their estimated QHP selections are 30.7K & 158K respectively.
OK, with that out of the way, here's where things stand (and remember, while most of the states are current through 2/06, a few of the State Exchange states haven't been updated since as far back as January 15th, so the picture could be quite different once those are updated):
As I noted last week, Washington State is doing things a bit backwards from just about every other state...instead of reporting the total number of QHP selections and then, in a few cases, also reporting the number of enrollees who have actually paid their first premium, the WA HealthBenefit Exchange is only reporting enrollments after they've made their first payment.
On the one hand, I wish every state was reporting this number. On the other hand, unlike MA & VT (which report both numbers) or Rhode Island (which is reporting both, but only including the total selections after subtracting those who are past-due on their payments), WA isn't including the total selections at all. This makes things a bit tricky for me, since I'm trying to report both numbers.
As a result, what I'm doing for the moment is assuming the standard 88% payment rate, which means that today's announcement of 139,000 QHP enrollmentsshould mean roughly 158,000 total selections:
HEALTHSOURCE RI RELEASES ENROLLMENT, DEMOGRAPHIC AND VOLUME DATA THROUGH FEBRUARY 7, 2015
Posted on February 11, 2015 | By HealthSource RI
PROVIDENCE – HealthSource RI (HSRI) has released enrollment data, certain demographic data and certain volume metrics through Saturday, February 7, 2015, for Open Enrollment.
RENEWAL UPDATE
As of February 7, 2015, 79% of Year One customers have renewed (selected a plan) for 2015
(77% of renewing customers paid the first month’s premium).
Total New Customers: 8,547 (7,372 paid)
Total Renewed Customers: 20,240 (19,617 paid) Total HealthSource RI enrollments for 2015 coverage: 28,787 (26,989 paid)
*Note: Individuals who have selected a plan but not paid by their selected coverage effective date become cancelled; reported enrollment values (plan selections, paid and unpaid) will fluctuate with potential net decrease due to plan selection cancellation, as of the passage of the January coverage payment deadline.
On Wednesday the 11th, HHS should issue a report including all HC.gov QHP selections as of Friday the 6th. I'm expecting the total to be roughly 7.75 million, or about 276K for the week.
This is possibly the dumbest story to make Major Headlines this week, but apparently GOP Speaker of the House John Boehner uttered the word "ass" in public.
Considering that VP Biden was caught on tape referring to the signing of the Affordable Care Act as a "Big F*cking Deal", I'm not quite sure I understand why Boehner saying "ass" is newsworthy, but what the hell: Here's my own connection to that "story": About 1:20 into this Al Jazeera America segment from March 26th, Boehner says "What the hell is this, a joke??" referring to the 2-week "extension period" tacked onto the end of last spring's Open Enrollment Period.
Oh, yeah...immediately after he rhetorically asks, "What the hell is this, a joke??", the segment turns to...me! (This has been, to date, my only televised appearance):
As of last Thursday, total QHP selections on the Massachusetts exchange were up to just shy of 119K. Between the weekend and the massive snowstorm that MA is digging out of, they went 5 days without a dashboard report, until today:
As always, I only have the QHP determinations to go by between their weekly reports. As of yesterday, those stood at 221,877, Subtract the 214,027 as of 2/05 and that's another 7,850 QHP determinations. Assuming 50% of those followed through with selecting a plan (a reasonable assumption at this point) and that's another 3,900 QHPs, or at least 122,600 QHPs to date.
Of course, that means that there's also another 99,000 people who started the process and have been approved for a private policy, but who may--or may not--have actually completed the process. Heading into the final 5 days, I presume that more and more of this enrollee pool will be scratched off the list; if, say, 80% of these folks follow through, Massachusetts would hit at least 200,000 QHPs by Sunday night.
Last year, I started out tracking just 2 numbers: Exchange-based QHPs and Medicaid via official ACA expansion provisions. As time went on, I gradually added other types of Obamacare-specific healthcare policy enrollments:
Off-exchange policies which were compliant with the new law;
People who were already eligible for traditional Medicaid prior to expansion (and in non-expansion states) but who were only "drawn out of the woodwork" to sign up thanks to outreach efforts, educational programs and streamlining of the enrollment process in many states
People who were transferred over from other existing low-income state-run healthcare programs (often with shaky funding) into Medicaid proper;
Enrollees in small business policies via the ACA's SHOP program (granted, this never ended up being more than a rounding error...less than 80K total)
Young adults aged 19 - 25 who were allowed to stay on their parent's plan thanks specifically to the ACA
As noted earlier, there's a lag between the exchange-based QHP data from HC.gov vs. the Oregon Insurance Division, so you can ignore that number. However, the off-exchange number should be accurate (and this is the official source for it anyway):
Members enrolled,
Nov. 15-Feb. 1
On Healthcare.gov 86,606 Outside of Healthcare.gov 95,859
Total 182,465
Last week the off-exchange total was 92,872, so that's about a 3,000 enrollee increase, for whatever that's worth.
According to the HC.gov weekly snapshot report, as of 2 days earlier (1/30), Oregon's exchange-based total was 94,126...slightly less than the off-exchange number. It'll be interesting to see if that ratio holds steady next week after the final deadline surge goes through.
Remember "Florida Health Choices", the brainchild of Republican Senator Marco Rubio which was supposed to be the Florida GOP's response to the Affordable Care Act health insurance exchanges?
The Florida Republican Party flushed $900,000 in startup funds into a website/"exchange" which signed up a whopping 30 paying customers in 6 months, at a cost of $30,000 apiece...or between 46x - 81x as much per enrollee as the "wasteful" HealthCare.Gov.
