CEO Mario Schlosser is happy to finally be able to sell. The company started this year’s enrollment period with 17,000 members and grew to “way more than that” in the first week, he says. That represents around $85 million in annual revenue from health insurance premiums, which he says equals “a few hundred million dollars in actual health care spend.”
Oscar’s member count sounds small compared to what people have come to expect for Web startups, where anything shy of 10 million users is a flop. But 17,000 members handily beats the company’s initial goal of 7,500, Schlosser says. Oscar now claims 10% market share for the health care exchange in New York, its home market. Two weeks ago, Oscar began selling in New Jersey. The company has plans to expand into California and Texas in late 2015.
OK, I've been considering this for a few days now, but I wanted to wait for the actual 3rd week HC.gov snapshot to come in before committing to it.
Until now, I've kept my 2015 Open Enrollment Period projections pretty solid: 7.0 million by Dec. 15th; 8.0 million by Jan. 15th and 12.0 million by February 15th.
Of that 12.0 million total, I figured that around 88% will (eventually) pay for at least their first month's premium, or around 10.6 million.
With the deadline approaching for individuals to renew healthcare plans purchased on HealthCare.gov, Aetna has begun to see a surge in customers for 2015, the insurer's new president said on Thursday during a meeting with analysts and investors.
HealthCare.gov has a Dec. 15 deadline for individuals to renew their 2014 plans or select new ones before it will automatically re-enroll them for next year. Enrollment for individual plans is open until Feb. 15, which were created under the 2010 Affordable Care Act, often called Obamacare.
Karen Rohan, whose appointment was announced earlier this month, said that the company expects a surge in enrollment over the next few days and that it was "starting to see" that already. Aetna sells these plans in 17 states.
Hmmm...on the surface these numbers seem fairly clear: 8,058 QHPs, 20,942 Medicaid. However, the wording of the article, combined with the fact that 8K in 26 days is only 310/day so far (versus 2014's 396/day average) makes me suspect that this only refers to new enrollments and doesn't include renewals of existing enrollees. In addition, the previous data release by AccessHealthCT clarified that it only included new enrollments.
So far, in the ongoing round of open enrollment that began Nov. 15, some 8,058 Connecticut residents have enrolled in plans offered by private insurers and 20,942 have enrolled in Medicaid plans, Madrak said. That’s more than the first year at around this time. However, the numbers last year were reversed and some 14,365 residents enrolled with one of the private insurance carriers and 9,075 had enrolled in Medicaid through the close of business Dec. 4, 2013
If this only includes new enrollees, then the odds are that the total number is actually at least double that (16K+) and likely more like 20K+.
BOOM, there it is: Washington State has been pretty quiet on the update front, due, no doubt, to having to clean up a rather embarrassing screw-up on the part of their IT systems integrator a week or so ago when over 6,000 account enrollments/payments were accidentally cancelled.
However, I'm very happy to report that not only do they appear to have resolved most of this issue (2/3 of the accounts have been restored so far), but they've released detailed, up-to-date data...and it's pretty damned impressive so far:
Updated enrollment totals are included below:
Qualified Health Plans - New: 10,082
Qualified Health Plan Renewals: 45,843
Total: 55,925
Washington Healthplanfinder Business
Accounts Created: 1,550
Total Completed Applications – Link Sent to Employees: 73
Total Enrollments – Employee Plan Selection Complete: 3
*Note: These numbers reflect QHP enrollments through Dec. 10 and Medicaid Enrollments through Dec. 4.
They also reported on the Medicaid (Apple Health) situation:
Until now, I've relied on states like Maryland, Massachusetts and Vermont, which have given out frequent 2015 enrollment updates, to point out how impressive the enrollment stats have been this time around; Maryland and Vermont are currently running at nearly 5x their 2014 pace, while Massachusetts is adding people at an astonishing 10x their 2014 rate.
However, these are pretty misleading, because all 3 of those states had such Godawful websites last year that it didn't take much to outperform this year.
Instead, consider states whose exchanges were already doing pretty well out of the gate last year, such as Colorado:
On the surface, this looks pretty good, but nothing jaw-dropping. 24,811 in 27 days is 919/day, or about a 50% improvement over 2014's 627/day.
However, break it out between the first 16 days and the next 11 and it's a different story:
The Maryland exchange just tweeted out a rough total enrollment number: 76K. It isn't broken out between commercial policies and Medicaid, but based on the trend until now it looks like it should be roughly a 56/44 split, or around 43,000 QHPs & 33,000 Medicaid/CHIP enrollees:
Beneficiaries with Healthy Michigan Plan Coverage: 474,372
(Includes beneficiaries enrolled in health plans and beneficiaries not required to enroll in a health plan.)
*Statistics as of December 8, 2014
*Updated every Monday at 3 p.m.
Now, obviously that 477K eligibility figure could be off (I had previously heard estimates as high as 500,000).
This is a nice article giving a status report on how things are going in Nevada (which, along with Oregon, scrapped their own ACA exchange last year and moved over to Healthcare.Gov). It includes a straightforward enrollment number: "more than 10,000" right in the title.
However, the wording of the article makes it unclear as to whether that number includes unsubsidized QHP enrollments or just the 85% or so who qualify for tax credits:
Compared to last year’s rollout, Nevada Health Link is showing stronger numbers so far in this year’s open enrollment.
More than 10,000 Nevadans have enrolled for subsidized health care plans through the state insurance program.
The enrollment numbers are good news and show signs of improvements at Health Link, Nevada’s online health care market.
At this time last year, only 6,000 people had signed up. It was Health Link’s first year online.
The comparison number below (6,000 last year) make it sound like 10K includes everyone, but the "subsidized" caveat makes it sound like it doesn't, in which case the total number should be roughly 11,700 or so.
I'll go with the lower 10K number for now, however.
When you visit the link, it goes to a video interview with the executive director of the HI exchange, who states, when asked "do we know how many signups there've been so far?" that "it's about 12,000; we were at 250 this time last year, so we've made a lot of progress."
Now, hold the phone a minute. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, Hawaii only has around 53,000 residents total who are even eligible to enroll via the ACA exchange to begin with.
