Yes, I realize it's kind of stupid to post The Graph when there's barely anything to Graph yet, but I wanted to set the stage for 2015 #OE2. As you can see, I'm doing it in a much cleaner, more organized way this time--the timeline includes the entire open enrollment period (which is less awkward to do this year since it's only 3 months instead of 6).
I've also overlaid projection lines to show roughly how I expect the QHP enrollment pattern to go--an initial "mini-surge", then a massive spike as the December 15th deadline approaches (anyone who's already enrolled who auto-renews or manually switches to a different policy will be part of this, since they don't want to have a coverage gap in January). I'm assuming roughly 7 million QHPs by 12/15 (or possibly a few days later...it's my understanding that some state exchanges are using 12/18 as the cut-off for January 1st?).
Then things should level out a bit from mid-December until mid-January because all the autorenewals will be accounted for (not to mention the holiday season). I'm figuring perhaps 1 million more; these folks will have coverage starting on February 1st.
OK, this one is a bit vague, but for the moment I'll take it. "Land of Lincoln Health" is an insurance CO-OP which operates, as you'd imagine from the name, in Illinois. I'm fairly certain that's the only state they operate in, so this number should be restricted to IL:
Land of Lincoln has enrolled “several hundred people” since open enrollment began this past Saturday, and the plan is already receiving payments from consumers, said Dorgan, who is in charge of finding and renewing members. About 6,000 people visited Land of Lincoln's website over the weekend with no apparent technology issues—an auspicious start for a plan that hopes to have 50,000 covered lives for 2015.
For the moment I'll assume "several hundred" means "300 - 400" and will go with 350 until better data comes out.
This is excellent news for another reason as well: Land of Lincoln only scored about 2,500 enrollees for 2014 open enrollment, so they're at something like 14% of their entire 2014 number in just 2 days.
Again, for comparison, during the first open enrollment period, Minnesota enrolled 48,495 people, or 242 per day, so their initial pace is about even with that so far:
More than 500 people signed up for commercial health insurance this weekend through MNsure, the state’s health insurance exchange.
Open enrollment started Saturday at MNsure, and more than 27,000 new and returning users accessed the health exchange website through the weekend, said Scott Leitz, the MNsure chief executive during a news conference Monday in St. Paul. About 2,700 people phoned the MNsure call center for help, and the average wait time was about two minutes, Leitz said.
The first-weekend figures are a good start toward meeting enrollment goals, Leitz said. The number of phone calls this weekend was 10 times the typical volume for MNsure.
By comparison, during the first open enrollment period, as of April 19th, Maryland had only enrolled 67,757 people in private policies, or 338 per day (or around 840 in 2.5 days).
So, right off the bat Maryland is doing twice as well so far this time around.
Given those significant changes, officials are urging uninsured and insured residents to explore their options. Those who purchased plans through the healthcare.gov marketplace will automatically be re-enrolled, but health care advocates say renewal may not be the best option because the tax credits that subsidize coverage could have changed. And some who signed up last year instead may be eligible for the state's newly expanded Medicaid program.
Officials seemed to have learned from their mistakes—at the very least, the site went through more testing—but there are still questions about what the administration has done to improve the user experience, whether premiums have gone up, whether people will enroll and whether the less-talked-about state-run exchanges are fixed, too.
(Technically speaking Massachusetts' eventual QHP total ended up being around 34,000, but with attrition/etc. it has likely fallen back down to around 32K by now anyway, so that's still a pretty fair comparison).
From the Press Release:
NEARLY 12,000 INDIVIDUALS & FAMILIES SUCESSFULLY DETERMINED ELIGIBLE FOR ACA HEALTH INSURANCE VIA MAHEALTHCONNECTOR.ORG
Sunday morning, the big ACA news of the day was HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell announcing that over 100,000 applications had been successfully submitted and processed on Day One of the 2015 Open Enrollment Period.
This is significant news, and I made sure to write a full post about it at around 10am.
However, throughout the day I noticed that an awful lot of people kept confusing 100K applications with 100K enrollments, which is not the same thing. Even the New York Times made this error (quickly corrected thanks to an, um, anonymous tip). As I noted in my post yesterday morning:
I'm as geeked as any ACA supporter, but some context and clarification is important here. Last year there was a lot of confusion about the distinction between someone:
As I posted last night, most of the ACA exchanges seemed to be running pretty smoothly for the launch this year, with two exceptions: CoveredCA, which was having some sort of serious problems throughout the day (I'm not clear how widespread they were), and the Washington Healthplanfinder, which was actually deliberately taken completely offline after only a few hours, and remained offline until this morning:
The problem was noticed during the site’s first hours of operation on Saturday morning, the first day of open enrollment for 2015 plans. The staff decided to take the site down for repairs at 10 a.m.
The good news is that the issue appears to have been fixed, and it didn't impact too many people (of course, that also means that an unknown number of potential enrollees were lost in the interim). In any event, it looks like we also have an unofficial Day One enrollment number, anyway:
Earlier today I had a rather infuriating exchange with someone who's pissed off at the all-new Massachusetts Health Connector because they dare to require him to (wait for it)...re-enter his personal data this year!! Can you believe it?? The nerve!!
I tried giving a reasonable response: Yes, it's annoying, but there could be plenty of reasons why the MA data has to be re-entered. Perhaps the database was corrupted. Perhaps it was hacked and riddled with backdoors. Perhaps it was just in some sort of weird, proprietary format which couldn't be migrated. Perhaps it could have been, but it would've cost gazillions of dollars and/or time more than it already did. Perhaps the MA exchange officials are incompetent (this last was certainly true for Take One, anyway).
But that wasn't good enough for this guy. He wouldn't let it go; kept pestering me about it for like another 15 minutes on Twitter before I finally told him to talk to the MA exchange and leave me out of it. Then I had to block him because he just wouldn't shut up about it.
Yes, that's right. I'm posting a blog entry about exactly one person being enrolled. Let it never be said that I'm not meticulous in documenting my data:
Saturday was the first day of open enrollment in Maryland and around the nation on exchanges created under the Affordable Care Act for people who do not get health insurance through employers. In Maryland, residents received their first shot at gaining coverage at an enrollment fair in Glen Burnie, hosted by the state's nonprofit partner HealthCare Access Maryland.
Banda arrived at 9:22 a.m., 38 minutes early. She was fourth in line. By 9:30 a.m., about a dozen people were waiting, and organizers decided to get the day started early. Less than an hour later, she became the first enrollee on the state's new exchange website. Her plan will cost her $97 a month, she said, and her co-pay will be zero.
"I feel awesome," she said. "It's a relief. I feel that it's going to work for me."
And yes, I've even plugged the number into The Spreadsheet :)
