I really, really like this guy--not just because he's strongly embraced the ACA, but because his philosophy is very much in line with mine when it comes to transparency:
Washington Insurance Commissioner Mike Kreidler grabbed national attention last year when he broke with President Obama’s efforts to mollify a public upset by canceled insurance plans. Of late, Kreidler has been openly critical of the state’s botched efforts to make repairs to the online insurance exchange.
But Kreidler remains a champion of the effort to make universal health care a reality, and Washington has taken some meaningful steps in that direction. The state has reduced the number of uninsured residents by roughly 38 percent since it expanded who is eligible for Medicaid and opened a new insurance marketplace in October 2013.
It looks like my "Denny's Grand Slam" Halbig/King workaround is being seriously mulled over by TPTB, although I'm sure it'd be more like a Filet Mignon kind of a thing in practice:
This article from the Seattle Times is primarily about the Washington State exchange still having some technical problems, but there's also a key #OE2 enrollment nugget:
Of the 25,000 applications completed on the exchange so far in the first week of the second round, more than 10,000 are for insurance plans while the remainder are Medicaid applications. Officials don’t yet know how many are people renewing their coverage, as opposed to new customers. Roughly 2,000 of the applicants have scheduled their first payments.
There you go: 10K applications, 2K actually selected & enrolled. Since the article was published at around 6pm on Tuesday, I'm assuming that number runs through Monday night.
Their governors might have hated Obamacare, but their attorneys general just love that Obamacare money.
Eleven states that chose not to set up their own health-care marketplaces filed court papers on Monday supporting the legality of federal subsidies that help their residents buy insurance plans through HealthCare.gov.
Those subsidies are being challenged by four lawsuits that claim only enrollees of health-care exchanges set up by an individual state can get that financial assistance, in the form of tax credits.
With enrollment now open for the federally run health insurance marketplace, Nebraska community groups are taking new approaches to reach out to those who lack coverage.
Illinois lawmakers may have one more chance to approve a state-run health insurance marketplace during the fall legislative session that starts today, and they are under pressure from an end-of-the-year deadline and a pending court decision.
Supporters of creating a state-run website say the impending deadline to receive up to $300 million in federal funding plus a U.S. Supreme Court decision on tax credits due in the spring create urgency. Currently, Illinois residents purchase insurance on the national HealthCare.gov website.
I'm pretty sure that in this case, "applications completed" does refer to actual "plans selected", judging from both the number from a day earlier (1,500) and the context of the quote, although I could be wrong (I also think that's supposed to read "through early Tuesday afternoon...")
Andrew Ratner, a spokesman for the exchange, said it seems to be working well so far. Ratner said 5,324 people have applied and 1,915 applications have been completed since early Tuesday afternoon.
A nice, detailed but to-the-point update out of DC (which supersedes my earlier post):
Meanwhile, as of Monday, D.C. Health Link had a little more than 9,000 visits to its website from about 6,300 visitors. The exchange had 708 total applications and 212 plan selections for 249 covered lives. Officials said they were off to a strong start toward their enrollment goals this year, though they've declined to disclose specific numbers.
This also shows the importance of using the correct number:
As I noted yesterday, the good news is that Massachusetts is posting daily metric reports on the new ACA Health Connector exchange, a level of frequency which surpasses even Minnesota.
The (mildly irritating) news is that with all of that data being served up daily, the main number that concerns me here at ACASignups--the "number who've selected a plan"--will only be included weekly, every Monday.
Still, until then I can at least get a rough idea. The most recent official press release stated that 3,600 QHPs had been enrolled in out of 6,972 people "determined eligible" for them, or 52% of the total. This number will bounce around from day to day, no doubt, but it's a reasonable starting point to use until Monday.
So, assuming 52% of "determined eligibles" are consistently actually enrolling in policies, today's dashboard report suggests that the number for the first 4 days has reached over 8,400 out of 16,293 total:
Nice to have an official number, and like the other state-run exchanges which have overhauled their systems, Minnesota's 2015 kickoff is a massive improvement over last year:
Strong Enrollment
Since the 2015 open enrollment period began on Saturday, 1,516 consumers have enrolled in Qualified Health Plans through the MNsure marketplace. By contrast, 406 consumers enrolled in Qualified Health Plans during the first two weeks of the 2014 open enrollment period, meaning MNsure has enrolled four times more people in its first four days than it did last year in two weeks. Also, 765 have enrolled in MinnesotaCare and 2,431 have enrolled in Medical Assistance. MNsure is the only place for Minnesotans to find out if they are eligible for financial assistance such as tax credits, and low-cost or no-cost coverage.
The 51 states (including the District of Columbia) that provided enrollment data for September 2014 reported nearly 68 million individuals were enrolled in Medicaid and CHIP. This enrollment count is point-in-time (on the last day of the month) and includes all enrollees in the Medicaid and CHIP programs who are receiving a comprehensive benefit package.
340,159 additional people were enrolled in September 2014 as compared to August 2014 in the 51 states that reported comparable September and August data.
Looking at the additional enrollment since October 2013 when the initial Marketplace open enrollment period began, among the 49 states reporting both September 2014 enrollment data and data from July-September of 2013, over 9.1 million additional individuals are enrolled in Medicaid and CHIP, approximately a 16 percent increase over the average monthly enrollment for July through September of 2013. (Connecticut and Maine are not included in this count.)
