Charles Gaba's blog

No official press release yet, but all of the numbers are here and are (thankfully) properly presented:

Following a flurry of activity leading up to a New Year’s Eve enrollment deadline for coverage on Jan. 1 — and also through the first 10 days of this month80 percent of first-year customers have signed up for a plan for this year, according to figures to be released on Thursday. Of those, 67 percent have followed through and paid their first monthly premium.

...Total enrollments for individuals now stands at 27,690, up from 25,288 just before the start of open enrollment in mid-November.

...“We were preparing for that with a very robust consumer outreach plan,” said spokeswoman Maria Tocco, adding, “I’m not sure we knew what to expect.”

...HealthSource RI reports that, as of Wednesday, 6,918 people who were not previously customers had been signed up for coverage. Wallack called that figure “great.”

...The new subscribers joined 20,772 returning individuals. Together, the two groups combined for an increase of 2,402 covered individuals, up slightly less than 1 percent from just before enrollment began.

The Access Health CT board of directors is holding a meeting this morning and promises to liveblog the latest developments, including updated enrollment numbers.

Connecticut hasn't updated their numbers since 12/15, when they announced 66K renewals and 19.4K new enrollees, so this should be somewhat interesting.

  • Remember that today (Jan. 15th) is the deadline for February 1st coverage

ENROLLMENT:

  • As of last Friday, "around" 90,000 customers (20% higher than last year)
  • 1,500 - 2,000/day...on track to hit/exceed (combined)
  • last year: 100 - 120K total (includes Medicaid)
  • midnight tonight: should have over 500K in system (includes Medicaid)
  • dental: 1K any day now

OPERATIONS:

  • IRS form 1095 (tax credit form)
  • education/outreach/etc. programs already in gear
  • some people already asking questions, etc. re taxes

SHOP:

Earlier, I noted that now that the HHS Dept. has broken out the 6.75 million confirmed QHP selections by state, combined with the state-based exchange data that I also have, I'm finally able to get a real sense of how each individual state is doing so far. I noted that 18 states have already reached 100% of their respective 2015 QHP goal based on the official national HHS projection of 10.4 million QHP selections by February 15, and many others are close to that.

Of course, I shouldn't be too geeked about that, since the HHS projection was almost certainly lowballed somewhat to begin with. Therefore, I've also come up with my own projection of where I think things will stand by 2/15: Around 12.5 million QHPs total. None of the states/DC have reached my state-level targets yet, although 4 small states (Alaska, Delaware, DC and North Dakota) are over 90% of the way there.

Aside from the Mystery of the Missing Renewal Data® from California & New York, the biggest unknown between now and the end of 2015 Open Enrollment on February 15th is this: How big of a "final deadline surge" will there be?

My 12.5 million projection is based on the assumption that there's a mini-surge happening this week (the deadline for Feb. 1st coverage is tomorrow in most states), followed by another 3 week "quiet period" from around January 20th until around February 10th. During that 3 week period, I QHP enrollments should average roughly 40K per day (up from the 30K/day that should have been the average over the first "quiet period" we just came out of). That would bring the grand total to around 10.5 million around February 10th.

Now, the actual tally might be a bit higher or lower than that until that point, but I'm pretty confident it'll be in the neighborhood of 10.5M. The bigger question is what happens in the final 5 days of the Open Enrollment period, from 2/11 - 2/15 (which also happens to be Valentine's Day week, for whatever that's worth).

Yesterday, Peter Lee of Covered California held a phone press conference in which he gave out updated data for new QHP enrollments (bringing the total up to over 217K), but refused to give out any numbers whatsoever when it comes to renewals / re-enrollments of 2014 enrollees...whether these were done actively by the enrollee or automatically by the system.

Needless to say, I was pretty irritated by this and wrote a cranky screed about it.

Just now, I've learned that the other major state exchange missing data--New York State of Health--has apparently stated that not only are they not giving out their renewal/re-enrollment data either, they aren't even going to give out any new updates until February 1st:

With today's confirmation of 6.75 million QHPs via HC.gov (thru 1/09) and the almost-certain-to-be-close 90K figure from Massachusetts (through yesterday), the confirmed (or virtually confirmed) QHP total nationally is now up to over 7.82 million. However, my estimate is now up to 9.34 million, or around 1.52 million higher.

I've done this before, but this seems like a good point to again review where the gap between the numbers is:

OK. The latest weekly snapshot released by the HHS Dept. an hour or so ago was about 25,000 enrollees higher than I figured, which is nice. However, the real news was that they included a state-level breakout of all 37 states, which is awesome!

I've plugged all 37 states into the spreadsheet, broken into 2 numbers: Total active renewals (ie, those who actively renewed or switched plans by the 12/15 deadline) and total autorenewals + new enrollments (unfortunately, I can't really break these out; I tried, but there are overlaps between the 12/15 ASPE report and the 12/19 weekly snapshot). In addition, the autorenewals are a "lump sum" instead of being broken out by state; I attempted to estimate based on the percent-of-total but came up with some states having negative figures, so obviously there are too many variables. That is, just because a particular state has, say, 2% of the active renewals doesn't mean they had 2% of the auto renewals, and so on.

Anyway, after plugging everything into the spreadsheet--along with the state-based exchange data--I can now see just where the HC.gov QHPs are...and the results are impressive and interesting in several ways:

  • At least 18 states (well, 17 + DC) have achieved 100% or more of the HHS's (admittedly lowballed) target (or in some cases, the state administration's publicly-stated target) for 2015 already. Note that this generally assumes 30% higher than last year's open enrollment total (ie, 10.4M nationally = 30% more than 8M):

Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Delaware, DC, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming

  • I say "at least" 18 because we still have zero renewal/re-enrollment data from California, New York or Hawaii, and even the new enrollee data is still as much as a month out of date in a few states.
  • Massachusetts, as always, is a special case. 30% higher than last spring would only be around 42,000; they're up well over 2x that already. However, a more realistic goal for them would be 175K or more given the unique nature of their situation.

Another likely 1,100 QHPs yesterday (out of 2,540 QHP eligibility determinations) means that Massachusett's QHP selection total should be up to around 90,700 by now. Medicaid has broken the 175K mark:

 

Last Friday I projected the total QHP selections through Healthcare.Gov to total around 6.73 million as of that day (January 9th).

The HHS Dept. just released the Week 8 "snapshot" report which has the actual total coming in slightly higher, at 6,756,438, about 0.4% higher.

The real news this week is that HHS has provided an updated STATE BY STATE BREAKDOWN for all 37 states operating off of the Federal ACA exchange!

This is a completely unexpected bonus, and kudos to the HHS Dept. for providing this!

I'm working right now on breaking the state-level numbers out by renewals and new enrollment using the table above + the monthly ASPE report from a couple of weeks ago, but that'll take a bit of time. Stay tuned...

As you may recall, a week or so ago I ran into a weird discrepancy with the numbers out of a few states. In the case of Vermont, it turned out that the enrollment data they were releasing included both QHPs and Medicaid without distinguishing between the two.

Fortunately, they've corrected this, so today's update (and future ones) has it all broken out:

The following numbers are up-to-date as of 11:59pm Monday, January 12, 2015.

New Vermont Health Connect Customers

8,709 individuals have checked out a 2015 health plan. This includes 3,506 individuals in Qualified Health Plans (private health insurance) and 5,203 individuals in Medicaid or Dr. Dynasaur plans.

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