The last MNsure update was 1/25, when they had 44,331 QHP selections. Since then, they've added just 1,642 more...or about 150/day. In order to reach their lowered target of 67K by 2/15, they'll need to add 2,100/day for 10 days straight. I just don't see them pulling that off.
Still, if they can reach, say, half of that, they'll add another 11K, which would bring their total up to perhaps 57,000, which isn't unreasonable.
Meanwhile, Minnesota's Medicaid/MinnesotaCare tally is up to 78,863 combined.
February 6, 2015
MNsure will release 2015 enrollment metrics weekly, and will present a more robust metrics summary to the MNsure Board of Directors at each regularly-scheduled board meeting. During weeks that MNsure is closed on Friday, the enrollment metrics update will be released earlier in the week.
Health Coverage Type Cumulative Enrollments
Medical Assistance 57,593
MinnesotaCare 21,270 Qualified Health Plan (QHP) 45,973
TOTAL 124,836
As of January 26th, California's 2015 QHP selection total was at least 1.217 million people. I say "at least" because the actual renewal number is a bit fuzzy (it's either 944K or 947K depending on whether you go by the CoveredCA or HHS/ASPE report). Anyway, today they issued a press release which at least updates the new enrollee number...if you do the math:
(etc etc...too long to post the whole list)
Add them all up and you get 288,568 new enrollees for 2015. Add those to the 944K (minimum) renewals from 2014 and you get 1,232,568 or more through Feb. 2nd.
Since the prior number was 1,217,111 as of 1/26, that's an average of around 2,200/day over the course of the slowest patch of the enrollment period.
Yesterday I lamented the fact that the Washington State ACA exchange seemed to be seriously lagging behind just about every other state in terms of achieving their 2015 QHP selection target, with only 132K QHPs to date vs. the 215K that they were hoping to reach this year (not to mention my personal target of 250K, which turns out to have been way out of line).
I figured that they're on track to only end up with perhaps 180-190K by 2/15, coming up 25K - 35K short of their goal.
However, IBD's Jed Graham (who has been on fire lately; this is the 2nd important point he's brought to my attention this week) reminded me that last year, unlike every other state except Massachusetts, Washington only reported paid enrollments, not total plan selections. If that's true this year as well, he noted, then I've been missing roughly 12% of WA's total all along (put another way, I should be plugging that 132K number into the paid column, not the total column).
OK, looks like my QHP estimate over the past week was fairly close, but a bit conservative...actual QHPs selected are up to nearly 119K, with just shy of 100K even having paid their first premium (thus completeing their enrollment).
100K / 119K = an 84% payment rate, but remember that anyone who has enrolled since 1/23 doesn't have to pay their first premium for over 2 weeks, so this isn't cause for concern.
Meanwhile, they have another 95,000 people who have been determined eligible for QHP selections waiting in the queue, of which nearly 6,000 have a plan in their shopping cart but just haven't pulled the trigger.
MA will have to have 51,274 more QHP selections to reach the 170K target (which, admittedly, was my interpretation of their target, not necessarily their target itself). That'd be 4,600/day, vs. the 1,447/day they've averaged so far.
In 1972, Harlan Ellison edited an anthology of sci-fi short stories called Again, Dangerous Visions (a sequel to "Dangerous Visions", naturally). One of the stories, by Edward Bryant, is called "The 10:00 Report Is Brought to You by..."
The premise of the story is a cynical, burnt-out TV news reporter who discovers, to his disgust, that the network that he's working for has figured out a foolproof way of getting exclusive coverage of breaking news stories...by creating them (and yes, a similar plot device was used in the James Bond film, Tomorrow Never Dies).
Specifically, the reporter discovers that the network has set up a bunch of remote camera units throughout a small town and then paid a local biker gang to actually invade the town and loot/pillage/terrorize the place, so that they'll have juicy, compelling live footage of actual arson, robbery and looting taking place.
The Washington State ACA exchange released updated 2015 enrollment numbers today, broken out by county, current through January 31st. They've even broken each county out between renewals from 2014 and new additions for 2015. The grand totals?
With yesterday's 1,737 QHP determinations, Massachusetts has likely tacked on another 800 QHPs or so, bringing them up to around 117.5K. In order to reach the 170K target I've estimated, they'll have to enroll about 52K in just 11 days, or a whopping 4,700/day.
I won't know until their weekly report tomorrow whether my "45% of determinations" ratio still stands. At this point the other half of the lingering QHP determinations should start to be kicking in...there's over 214K total; if 117.5K have already selected a plan, that means there's still another 96K people who have gone through about 2/3 of the process already; most of them should be coming back to complete the job now.
For comparison, in 2014, with their broken exchange system, they only averaged 158/day. For the current period, they averaged 1,950 through the January deadline (11/15 - 12/23), and 999/day during the February period (12/24 - 1/22), though that was missing the crucial deadline day of 1/23. Since then they seem to have averaged about 726/day, though that's mostly durign the slowest part of the enrollment period.
Regular readers know that I've been a bit obsessed with hunting down the Mysterious World of OFF-exchange QHPs®...enrollees in fully ACA-compliant individual policies which aren't run through the exchanges (ie, no tax credits), but directly through the insurance companies themselves (Blue Cross, Aetna, whatever).
As I noted in my recent piece for healthinsurance.org, last year off-exchange QHPs ended up being a bit higher than as on-exchange: Around 8 million, give or take. However, this was just a rough estimate patched together from various data points, and even then it's likely that some number of those were the so-called "grandfathered" plans (which can continue indefinitely until the enrollee dies or cancels/stops payment) or the "transitional" (aka "grandmothered") plans, which are the ones which were supposed to be discontinued on 12/31/13, but were given up to a 3-year extension period depending on the state and insurance company.
A couple of weeks ago, Maryland blew past the HHS Dept's target for the state (88K QHPs) and hit 94K as of 1/22. I noted that they were on their way towards easily hitting my personal, higher target of 105K by 2/15.
In response, a few days ago I went through all 50 states (+DC) and adjusted my own projections, lowering them in 9 states while bumping them up in 26 others, including Maryland. I tacked another 10K onto MD to 115,000 QHP selections. (Note that I'm leaving my original projections in the actual spreadsheets to avoid confusion; the revisions are more just to confirm that I recognized where the trendlines would be and where my earlier logic fails were).
