Maryland just released their second official 2015 Open Enrollment report, and the numbers continue to impress:
As of Dec. 4, a total of 51,796 Marylanders have enrolled in quality, affordable health coverage for calendar year 2015 since the 90 day open enrollment period began Nov. 15. This includes 29,543 individuals enrolled in private Qualified Health Plans and 22,253 individuals enrolled in Medicaid.
From Nov. 15 to Dec. 4, 62,713 consumer accounts were created; 66,752 calls were made to the Consumer Support Center and 339,578 individuals visited the MarylandHealthConnection.gov website.
Marylanders must enroll or renew their plans by Dec. 18 for insurance that starts New Year’s Day. Open enrollment for 2015 ends Feb. 15.
For comparison, during the 2014 OE period, MD enrolled 67,757 people. They're already at 43.6% of that in just 20 days this time around.
Even I was surprised when I read that Minnesota's ACA exchange, MNsure, was projecting to more than double their 2015 enrollment figure. Yes, other states like Massachusetts are expected to increase their numbers severalfold, but it always seemed like a stretch for Minnesota, especially with their largest 2014 participant, PreferredOne, dropping out this year. They hit around 50K last year and were originally projecting to hit over 100K this time around.
Sure enough, they've decided to walk that number back a bit, down to 67K...which would be an increase of only 38% over the
48,495 they enrolled during the first open enrollment period:
MNsure on Wednesday said it was cutting by about one-third the number of people it expects will enroll in private health plans through the exchange for 2015.
That means MNsure will also see a drop in revenue, although officials say they expect to end the fiscal year next June with no red ink.
State officials say they don't yet know how enrollment is going this year in Delaware's health insurance exchange.
The Delaware Health Care Commission received an update Thursday on the second year of implementation of the Affordable Care Act.
But state health and social services officials say won't be able report any enrollment numbers until they get them from the federal government. They say they hope to see the first monthly federal report around later this month.
I did receive these oddly-worded tidbits via Twitter:
More than 23,612 Delawareans have enrolled in a #ACA plan since October 2013#netDE
For each of the first two weeks, HC.gov has reported that the total QHP enrollments to data are split roughly evenly between new enrollees and renewals, which I find rather interesting; I was figuring that the early days would skew more heavily towards renewals, perhaps by a 2:1 or 3:1 ratio.
Part of this could simply be different states cancelling each other out--after all, all enrollees in both Nevada and Oregon, which were shifted over to HC.gov this year, are being categorized as "new" since the enrollees had to start over again; between the two states, that's up to around 110,000 current enrollees who would be listed as "new" even if they were re-enrolling...so it's possible that there are other states with a higher "renewal" ratio which is cancelling those two out.
Oh for the love of...I spent a solid year screaming at HealthCare.Gov to start releasing their data on a regular basis; they finally did so, and now Covered California has decided to go radio silent instead. This is, quite simply, unacceptable.
In California, however, officials at Covered California, the Obamacare exchange here,haven't provided updates since Nov. 20, when they released data for the first four days of the new open enrollment session.
Covered California released those preliminary figures Nov. 20, when Executive Director Peter Lee revealed that 11,357 people signed up for private health plan coverage between the Nov. 15 beginning of this year's open enrollment period and Nov. 18.
...Since Nov. 20, there have been no new updates, and officials don't expect to announce new figures until mid- to late December, at the earliest, and possibly not until January.
I actually feel rather stupid about not looking into this earlier, but now's as good a time as any: In my latest post over at healthinsurance.org, I go over the various deadlines for both enrolling and making initial premium payments for January 1st, 2015 exchange policy coverage (and how this factor might impact my QHP projections). Take a look!
OK, this particular experiment is specifically for HealthCare.Gov QHP enrollments only, not the national total including the state exchanges. I'm trying to see just how much of a correlation there is between the Massachusetts exchange (the only state providing daily enrollment updates) and HealthCare.Gov. Obviously there are a lot of differences between the two beyond scale, but so far they've tracked pretty closely on a number of criteria, so I want to see if that holds true on actual enrollments as well.
So, this is actually a twofold projection:
On Monday, I suspect the MA Health Connector will announce roughly 33,300 QHP selections as of the end of Friday, December 5th.
Then, on Wednesday, I'm going to assume that HHS will announce roughly 465,000 additional QHP selections in the 3rd week, for a total of around 1.23 million QHPs via HC.gov thorugh Friday, December 5th.
Should be interesting to see how far off I am on this...
