The Obama administration says that nearly a half-million people selected insurance plans throughHealthcare.gov during the first week of Obamacare open enrollment, in mid-October. Nearly half (48 percent) were new customers who had not previously purchased coverage last year, suggesting that the law could widen its reach to more uninsured Americans in year two of coverage expansion.
The new numbers, released by Health and Human Services Wednesday, show a faster start to open enrollment this year than in 2013. Last year, during Healthcare.gov's botched launch, only 106,185 consumers selected health insurance plans during the entire first month of enrollment.
...These figures do not include those consumers using the 14 state-based exchanges, in places like California and New York, where the federal government does not run the insurance marketplace.
And they also do not necessary show total enrollment: those who selected a plan still need to send a first month's premium to their insurance plan in order for their coverage to kick in on January 1.
6 days ago, after the revelation that the HHS Dept. had overstated the actual number of people currently enrolled in ACA exchange healthcare policies by 393,000 people by double-counting dental plans, I posted a screed in which I blasted them for "jerking me around". At the time I assumed that they had deliberately padded the number in an attempt to keep the official number above the "magic" 7 million threshold.
I closed my diatribe with the following:
I'm going to continue updating the site because I believe that the Affordable Care Act, with all of its flaws and shortcomings, is still an important and substantial improvement over the system that we had before it.
I just wish that you guys had enough confidence in your own policies not to embellish the metrics...especially when they stand on their own just fine.
OK, I almost always cite my sources on data points, but in this case I can't. On the other hand, it's not anything eyebrow-raising either; someone in a position to know has confirmed that at least 1,000 people had enrolled in QHPs via at least one insurer in Pennsylvania as of 11/19.
Considering that PA enrolled over 300,000 people last year, and there are 10 companies participating on the exchange in the state anyway, this isn't a particularly shocking data point, so I'll leave it there, but I can at least add it to the spreadsheet for Pennsylvania, anyway.
I know I've been saying that the worst-performing state exchanges from last year seem to be overperforming this year, but this is still a jaw-dropper. Maryland has done a complete turnaround this year:
As of Nov. 24, 2014, more than 25,000 Marylanders have enrolled in quality and affordable health coverage since the open enrollment period began on Nov. 15.
With the successful launch of the upgraded MarylandHealthConnection.gov website, 25,780 individuals have enrolled, including 14,749 enrolled in qualified health plans and 11,031 in Medicaid. From Nov. 15 to Nov. 24, 32,744 consumer accounts were created; 29,546 calls were made to the Consumer Support Center, and 79,681 visited the application portal on the website.
For comparison: Last year, Maryland enrolled a total of 67,757 people in 6 1/2 months. They've now achieved 22% of that total in just 10 days.
Yesterday I posted the MA Health Connector's first weekly dashboard report, in which they confirmed that yes, almost precisely 50% of all QHP determinations are consistently resulting in actual QHP enrollments on that same day. This held true on opening weekend (52%...3,600 out of 6,972) and held firm at 50% even in the first 8 days (14,101 out of 28,175), so I'm now pretty confident that it will stay at least at 50% daily going forward (obviously it should increase as we approach 12/15, which is fine).
Having said that, I can now add two more days to the tally...11/23 & 11/24:
So, that's 14,101 confirmed through 11/22. Add to that 50% of the Monday & Tuesday numbers (4,330 total) and you get an additional 2,165, or 16,266 QHP enrollments total.
OK, it might be slightly lower than 50% even, but certainly above 16K.
I just got off the phone with Christopher Snowbeck of the Star Tribune in Minnesota, who informed me that MN has a rather unique state law which, combined with the company dropping out of the ACA exchange, could have a serious impact on up to 23,500 residents who enrolled in policies via PreferredOne earlier this year.
To recap: MNsure, Minnesota's ACA exchange, enrolled roughly 48,500 people in private policies as of April. Unlike the 16% national attrition rate since then, Minnesota's ACA policies have retained 97% of their enrollments as of October (it's still at around 47,000 as of now out of 55,000 total enrollees to date). About 60% (33,000) of the total were through PreferredOne, although according to my sources, a good 10K of these have already moved on to other types of coverage (either a competitor, ESI, Medicare, Medicaid or whatever).
So, that leaves around 23,500 people still currently enrolled in MNsure-based PreferredOne policies as of October 15th.
Thanks to Bob Doherty for providing links to 2 extremely handy tools from the Kaiser Family Foundation, which break down 2014 QHP ACA exchange enrollments by various demographic criteria.
The state-level spreadsheet is no different from my own 2014 spreadsheet, except that it also includes an updated estimate of the potentialpool of QHP enrollees within each state.
The zip code tool, however, is far more impressive, as it lets you search enrollment data by zip code and then provides all sorts of demographic info within that area (not zip code specifically, but County and "city area"). It tells you what percentage of the potential market has enrolled, and then breaks the numbers down by ethnicity, education level, gender and so on.
The work done on these tools is impressive. However, there are a couple of major problems with them which limit their usefulness:
No 2015 data yet, but at least this has an update to the ACA Medicaid expansion figure for Delaware, tiny though it might be:
In addition to the Health Insurance Marketplace, some residents might be eligible for coverage through Delaware’s expanded Medicaid program, which continues year-round. More than 9,000 individuals have received coverage under the Medicaid expansion in the past year.
OK, not sure if this number runs through Thursday, Friday or Saturday given the conflicting wording ("before the week was over"), so I'm playing it safe and going with Friday:
By Thursday, the exchange had received about 25,000 calls and greeted about 1,800 walk-in visitors at its Contact Center at 70 Royal Little Drive. Meanwhile, the HealthSource RI website received about 35,000 hits, half of them from new visitors, an indicator that many may be first-time customers.
All of that activity resulted in 1,850 renewals and 319 new customers before the week was over.
“We are about where we expected to be at this point,” said Director Christine Ferguson, “but we have a long way to go.”
There's also some updated 2014 data:
As of Nov. 1, two weeks before the start of open enrollment, about 26,300 Rhode Islanders were covered by individual and family plans through HealthSource RI. Another 2,400 people had obtained coverage their small employers offered via the exchange. In addition, close to 70,000 enrolled in Medicaid through HealthSource RI.
Colorado becomes the 14th state with at least partial enrollment data, and as with every other state so far, the opening numbers are very, very good:
State health insurance exchange officials on Monday said 6,144 people have signed up in the first eight days of open enrollment for 2015, well ahead of last year's pace of 204.
The 6,144 sign-ups were predominantly renewals — 4,400 people re-enrolling though Connect for Health Colorado, according to its interim chief executive, Gary Drews.
...Among this year's enrollees, Drews said, 3,400 are receiving financial assistance.
The 936 people who have signed up for dental insurance since Nov. 15 compares favorably with the 87 dental plan enrollments for this period in 2013.
Also glad to see CO breaking out the renewal/new numbers; it'd be a nice touch if every state did so.
