Remember, Rhode Island bumped out their January coverage deadline all the way through New Year's Eve, so even this data is still presumably missing a small surge on the final day:
HEALTHSOURCE RI RELEASES ENROLLMENT, DEMOGRAPHIC AND VOLUME DATA THROUGH DECEMBER 27, 2014
Posted on January 2, 2015 | By HealthSource RI
PROVIDENCE – HealthSource RI (HSRI) has released enrollment data, certain demographic data and certain volume metrics through Saturday, December 27, 2014, for Open Enrollment.
Enrollment data (November 7, 2014 through December 27, 2014)
As of December 27, 2014, 71% of Year One customers have renewed plans for 2015.*
Total New Customers: 4,969
Total Renewed Customers: 17,941
Total HealthSource RI enrollments for 2015 coverage
(including those who have not yet paid): 22,910
*As of December 30, 74% of Year One customers have renewed plans for 2015.
SHOP (cumulative as of December 27, 2014)
Small employer applications completed: 532
Small employer accounts created: 1,904 Small employer enrollment: 437 (representing 3,157 covered lives, based on their submitted census)
Small employers enrolling in Full Choice Model: 76%
On it's surface, this sounds like a decent but not amazing update: Up 2,600 since 12/28. However, consider this: 86,347 QHP selections is up 6,360 since MD's January coverage deadline of 12/18. That means they're still enrolling new people at 454 per day for coverage starting in February...as opposed to the 339/day that they averaged duing the entire first open enrollment period. That's a rate over 33% faster.
In all the hullabaloo over the monthly HHS report yesterday, not a whole lot has been said about the Medicaid/CHIP side of things. Medicaid/CHIP enrollment has always been much trickier to pin down than private QHPs, partly due to the high "churn" rate of people moving onto & off of it, partly due to about 40% of the states not having implemented any version of ACA Medicaid expansion anyway, partly due to the headache-inducing rules for eligibility and nightmarish paperwork hoops people have to jump through to enroll in some states.
The other reason for confusion is that the HHS reports only state how many people were determined eligible for Medicaid/CHIP in each state. It doesn't necessarily follow that 100% of those folks actually end up being enrolled. This footnote from page 21 should give you an idea of how much of a pain in the ass this is to figure out:
In all the fuss and bother over yesterday's monthly HHS report (which only ran through the 15th), I almost forgot about the HC.gov-only "weekly snapshot" which was also released at the same time. This report only covers the 37 states run via the federal exchange, but is more recent; it goes all the way up through December 26th, just 5 days ago.
I did acknowledge the 96,446 additional QHP selections since the previous week at the very end of my analysis of the monthly report, but didn't look at the rest of the weekly report at the time. There's not a whole lot of new data here, but there are a couple of noteworthy tidbits:
They just released today's daily dashboard report, and the QHP eligibility determinations have gone up by another 6,263 people. Every day since Nov. 15th, roughly 50% of the QHP determinations have gone on to actually select a plan that very same day; the rate has ranged from 45% - 55% but always hovers near the 50% mark. Assuming this is still the case, that should mean at least 3,100 more QHP selections as of last night, for a total of around 80,600 to date.
In addition, MA has confirmed 139,063 new Medicaid/MassHealth enrollees, which have immediate effect.
As a side note, this means that MA has now enrolled more than 2.5x as many people in private plans for 2015 as they did all of last year.
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.
