I've been saying this for several days now, but yesterday's monthly HHS report confused the hell out of a whole bunch of people by making it sound as though the "current" number of private healthcare policy enrollments via ACA exchanges is only around 4 million. This was especially confusing to some given that a week ago they issued a "weekly snapshot" with nearly 6.4 million via HC.gov alone, and another weekly snapshot yesterday bumping that number up to nearly 6.5 million.
Now, I've been saying for a week or so now that the actual total is up to 8.65 million or more (more like 8.84 million as of today), but the headline above refers to the officially confirmed total. That doesn't mean estimates or speculation; that's the total number reported in official press releases from ACA exchange representatives.
Fewer Ohioans choose a health plan in 2015 enrollment
Nearly 89,000 Ohioans chose a health insurance through the Affordable Health Care marketplace during the second open enrollment in November and December, the federal government reported Tuesday.
Vermont Health Connect Open Enrollment and Renewal Update
The following numbers are up-to-date as of 11:59pm Tuesday, December 30, 2014.
Renewals: 23,356 individuals have been checked out into 2015 health plans.
New to Vermont Health Connect: 6,881 individuals have been checked out into 2015 health plans.
Customer Support Center Metrics (Week of Dec. 22-27)
Number of calls: 6,154
Average wait: 14.1 seconds
Number of calls answered in less than 30 seconds: 93.1%
Tracking Progress of New Applications
The following graph shows where new applicants are in the process between submitting their application and being covered by a qualified health plan. Please note that applicants who qualify for Medicaid are not included. The numbers are up-to-date as of Monday, December 29, 2014.
I know I said I would save any further analysis of today's monthly HHS report until tomorrow, but when I started plugging in the state-by-state numbers, I came up with some really strange discrepancies between the QHP selection number in the report and the corresponding report from some of the state exchanges for the same date.
It got to be so strange that I actually whipped up a little spreadsheet for all of the state-based exchanges (minus Massachusetts, which is a special case anyway; plus Oregon, which is running off of HC.gov this year but has a large discrepancy from the official State of Oregon Website which is reporting enrollments this year as well). The yellow lines are the states I'm most concerned about (the others all have either obvious explanations or are minor enough not to worry about). Afterwards I'll run through the problems with each one.
As I noted on Saturday, I was out of town for a few days (at a water park resort in Ohio, if you really want to know) with my family. We had a good time at the actual water park, but I strongly recommend avoiding the TGI Friday's attached to it. HHS Sec. Burwell noted last week that the first Big, Official, Comprehensive Monthly ASPE enrollment report (broken out by state and other demographics) would be released sometime this week. I knew it would come out either today or tomorrow; I was hoping they'd hold off for one more day, but I guess they wanted to put it out there so the HHS staff could go home for New Year's, which is reasonable.
As a result, I was driving back from Ohio (well, my wife was anyway...I drove down, she drove us back) when the news hit earlier today, and wasn't really in a position to do a full analysis from a moving car, though I did tweet back & forth about it quite a bit.
Ah, now that's more like it. I don't know how many of these folks are facing a 1-month coverage gap (40,581 were enrolled by 12/14; the rest came in sometime after that; I'm assuming perhaps 8,000 made it in under the wire on the 12/15 deadline?), but considering that Oregon had around 77K people enrolled in 2014 plans, this is a much better batting average for 2015 total coverage:
Open enrollment weekly updates
The Insurance Division will collect enrollment information from carriers each week throughout 2015 open enrollment. Updated numbers will be posted each week on this web page.
Members enrolled, Nov. 15-Dec. 21 On Healthcare.gov 67,467 Outside of Healthcare.gov 31,599
Total 99,066
About the data: Enrolled means a person has selected a plan. Consumers must pay the first month's premium for their coverage to become effective. These numbers do not identify whether the first month's premium has been paid. These numbers do not include Oregonians enrolled in the Oregon Health Plan (Medicaid).
A nice fully-detailed enrollment report out of Rhode Island, although there's a rather curious wording decision for an even more recent update:
PROVIDENCE – HealthSource RI (HSRI) has released enrollment data, certain demographic data and certain volume metrics through Saturday, December 20, 2014, for Open Enrollment.
Enrollment data (November 7, 2014 through December 20, 2014) 56% of Year One Customers Have Renewed Plans for 2015.* Total New Customers: 3,841
Total Renewed Customers: 13,780
Total HealthSource RI enrollments for 2015 coverage (including those who have not yet paid): 17,621
*HealthSource RI reports as of December 23, a total of 68% of Year One customers have renewed plans for 2015.
SHOP (cumulative as of December 20, 2014):
Small employer applications completed: 529
Small employer accounts created: 1,901 Small employer enrollment: 437 (representing 3,192 covered lives, based on their submitted census)
Small employers enrolling in Full Choice Model: 76%
Hmmm...OK, I admit I'm starting to get a bit concerned about Minnesota. True, they bumped out their January deadline enrollment date until tomorrow (New Year's Eve), so there's still 5 day's worth of data to go including what I assume will be some sort of surge today and tomorrow, but I was expecting them to be doing a bit better at this point. They had just over 41,000 2014 enrollees as of mid-October. Nationally over 90% of 2014 enrollees should be renewed either manually or automatically, but MN has a special situation given that the largest insurance company on MNsure dropped out, leaving over 60% of the total to find something else or be moved off of the exchange completely.
OK, I actually have 3 different sources for these Massachusetts numbers, and the dates and classifications overlap a bit so bear with me.
First, we have today's daily MA Health Connector Dashboard report, which states that there have been 148,453 QHP determinations thorugh yesterday (12/29). Assuming 50% of these have selected plans, that's around 74,200 QHP selections to date. In addition, the 134,803 Medicaid (MassHealth) enrollments are already locked in.
However, there's also this story from Felice J. Freyer of the Boston Globe from 12/28 (about a jaw-droppingly poor bit of timing by private, for-profit corporation Dell to install some sort of major software update which caused the payment system to be unavailable for 12 hours on the payment deadline), which pins down the numbers a bit further:
As of Dec. 28, a total of 146,529 Marylanders have enrolled in quality, affordable health coverage for calendar year 2015 since the 90-day open enrollment period began Nov. 15. That includes 83,735 individuals enrolled in private Qualified Health Plans (QHP) and 62,794 individuals enrolled in Medicaid.
At 83,735 enrollments so far, MD has now enrolled 24% more people than they did during all of the 2014 open enrollment period (67,757 thru April 19th).
Put another way, they've enrolled 375 people per day since their January deadline, which is still 11% faster than the 338/day they averaged during the first open enrollment period (including the December and March surges).
Add another 62,794 to Medicaid and MD's turnaround for 2015 is quite impressive indeed.
