I posted about Colorado's June enrollments a couple of weeks ago, but that was a rounded number and apparently was mixing in SHOP enrollees with QHPs. The official report has been released, and the numbers are a bit worse than I thought (though still impressive for off-season enrollment): 136,605 QHPs and 2,373 SHOP enrollments.
Arizona may not be adding Medicaid expansion recipients at nearly the same rate as states like Michigan, West Virginia and Arkansas, but they're doing a pretty good job; AZ is now up to over 192K people, or about 41% of the estimated 469K uninsured individuals who are eligible for Medicaid:
During the month of June, 19,736 were added to AHCCCS in the Proposition 204 Restoration Category (0-100% FPL) and 4,771 were added to Adult Expansion category. To date, 192,268 Arizonans have been added since January. The total AHCCCS population now stands at 1,552,186.
Yeah, yeah, I know...it's a bit stupid to set up a Facebook page now instead of, say, back in October, November, December...but whatever. I was encouraged by the response at Netroots Nation 2014 that there's still enough interest to keep the site not just running but running robustly, so here you go: The official ACA Signups Facebook Page.
Also, while I'm at it, I've established a separate Twitter account just for ACA Signups. I mainly did this to prevent any imposters from doing so, since so many people are already following @charles_gaba for ACA updates, but I'll probably start cross-posting at @ACASignups as well if enough people start following it.
NOTE: Yes, I'm back from the Netroots Nation convention here in Detroit, and yes, I have a mountain of ACA submissions (along with actual paying client work) to catch up on. However, with the DC Circuit Court ruling expected to come out tomorrow, it behooved me to post this ASAP:
A couple of weeks ago I posted a 2nd story about the last (to my knowledge) major anti-ACA case winding its way through the federal court system: Halbig v. Burwell.
In a nutshell, the plaintiffs are arguing that the precise wording of the ACA allows the IRS to issue tax subsidies to people who enroll in QHPs using the state exchanges (NY, CA, KY, CT, etc.), but not to people who enroll through the federal exchange (ie, Healthcare.Gov). If the case survives all the way through to the SCOTUS (or if it survives the full DC Circuit Court and the SCOTUS refuses to look at it), then it would presumably mean that almost 5 million people (or more) who enrolled via HC.gov and qualified for subsidies (about 85% of them) would a) have those subsidies cut off and b) could theoretically have to pay back the subsidies that they already received, assuming the ruling was retroactive.
I know I said I wouldn't be posting during the Netroots Nation convention unless something significant happened. Well, thanks to the Kaiser Family Foundation, I've learned of a pretty important development. The state of Rhode Island just released their decision on the APPROVED insurance premium rates for Blue Cross Blue Shield in 2015. Check it out:
As you can see, BCBSRI asked for an average rate increase of 8.9%. The state insurance commissioner approved...4.5%.
Obviously this may not be typical of what will happen in other states or for other companies, but the point is made: the preliminary rate requests are just that: Preliminary. You can REQUEST anything; that doesn't mean you'll get it.
UPDATE: I've found the market share breakout for both companies (the third one is new to the exchange), and it looks like BCBSRI made up almost all of it (98%), so the weighted average looks to come in at around 4.3%.
As I mentioned the other day, I'll be attending the Netroots Nation conference here in Detroit for the next few days. On the one hand, this would seem to be the perfect event to post lots of blog updates. On the other hand, most of those updates require me to muck around with spreadsheets and whatnot, which I don't really feel like screwing with for the duration of the conference.
So, unless there's some really major ACA-related news which breaks between now and Sunday, I probably won't be posting anything until then. Please feel free to send updates, they just won't be posted until after the conference.
As far as I know, Kliff hasn't referenced ACA Signups since the open enrollment period ended, but she's still doing great work on the ACA over at Vox, and today is no exception. She wrote up a nice outline of 7 major anti-ACA attack points and how every one of them have been knocked down, one by one:
Until a few days ago, my predictions about how many people would enroll in Qualified Health Plans via the Affordable Care Act exchanges were, without being boastful, dead-on target.
I called the New Year's Eve total with 98.2% accuracy and Medicaid/CHIP determinations through 12/31 with 99.7% accuracy.
I was off by less than 0.02% at the end of January, and by less than 1% through the end of February.
I projected the 3/31 total to be 7.08 million; the final tally was "around" 7.1 million, and my call of 7.78 million as of 4/15 was off by somewhere between 0 - 2.75% (I'll never know for certain because the only official number given (8.02 million) was as of 4 days later).
However, I'm obviously not perfect at this, and if I misjudge a significant factor, my projections will be off accordingly.
Like many other Republican-run states, Texas not only refused to set up their own ACA exchange or expand Medicaid, the state government actively sought out to prevent people from enrolling, actually enacting absurdly strict "regulations" to prevent ACA Navigators from doing their job to help people learn about their rights and how to go through the process:
The navigators must register with the state, undergo a background check and fingerprinting, and complete 20 hours of additional training — beyond the 20 to 30 hours of federal training they've already received.
Hmmm...OK, first it was Hawaii with the QHP total actually going down from 6/28 through 7/05. Then Minnesota reported a huge drop-off in their off-season enrollment rate, from about 52 per day from April through the end of June to just 2 per day for the first 13 days of July.
Now we have Oregon's latest update. While the total QHP figure has grown by 1,092 over the past week, the paid QHP number has only gone up by...10. That's right: Just 10 in the past week, or just over 1 person per day...down from over 300 per day in the off season until now.
(As an aside, new Medicaid enrollments are also slowing down, with just another 290 people being added to the program).
