Charles Gaba's blog

Given Oregon's disasterous technical issues, their success in manually processing hundreds of thousands of enrollments is actually quite impressive. In addition, kudos to them for being one of the only sources for dental policies, which has barely been written about by anyone (including myself):

Medical enrollments through Cover Oregon: 242,618
Total private medical insurance enrollments through Cover Oregon 1: 70,192                   

Oregon Health Plan enrollments through Cover Oregon: 172,426

Dental enrollments: Total private dental insurance enrollments through CoverOregon 1: 14,232                   

Net enrollments 
Net private medical 2:  66,052
Net private dental 2: 13,016

Minnesota wrapped up their own "extended-extension" period (they tacked on 1 more week onto the 4/15 extension, ending things on 4/22) with two nice milestones achieved: 50K exchange QHPs and 150K new Medicaid enrollees:

Combined enrollment in public and private plans now stands at 200,174, MNsure officials said. That includes 50,096 in private plans; 41,403 in MinnesotaCare, a public program  for low to moderate incomes that requires a modest premium contribution; and 108,673 in Medical Assistance, Minnesota’s version of Medicaid.

Presented without comment:

Oregon should pull the plug on the beleaguered Cover Oregon health insurance exchange and switch to the federal exchange, a technological advisory committee recommended Thursday.

The move is considered almost certain to be adopted by the Cover Oregon board, which meets Friday.

Changing to the federal exchange would cost about $5 million, while a partial fix to the Oregon exchange would cost more than $78 million based on an estimate from Deloitte, a Cover Oregon consultant.

OK, I lied; I do have two comments:

--First, residents of Oregon do still have 3 more days (today, tomorrow and Wednesday) to push their 2014 policy enrollments through the remnants of Cover Oregon, and I'm assuming that the current hobbled-together system will still be in place during the transition period for Qualifying Life Events, Medicaid enrollment and so forth.

I haven't updated the graph with this yet, but both the front page "quick stats" block and the spreadsheet now include my rough guesstimate for the final mop-up period from 4/16 - 4/30...I'm guessing an extra 93,000 or so people are being tacked on via stray paper applications, special cases and oddball "super-extension periods" in Nevada, Oregon, DC and Hawaii, etc.

this should bring the grand total through the end of April up to around 8.14 million, of which I expect AT LEAST 7.5 million to have paid their premiums by late May.

Of the pile of submissions and requests which piled up last week, at least a half-dozen were basically the same question: Where the hell is the official March HHS report? Obviously that report from Inside Health Policy claiming that they'd release the report back on the 17th, complete with early April data, was flat-out wrong.

The irony is, of course, that a) no one has been anticipating this report more than myself (it was supposed to mark the end of this project, after all...although obviously the situation has changed...more on that later); b) I was previously concerned that they'd release the report too early (cutting off the last 2 days of March and only including 3/02 - 3/29); and c) it's actually just as well that they didn't release it last week, since I was in no position to do anything with the data anyway (still on the mend, but I'm at least able to type up a few updates this morning, as you can tell).

"Healthy Michigan" is the plan which specifically refers to ACA expansion in MI only (36,307 of these are actually bulk-transfers from an existing program, already listed separately on the spreadsheet):

Healthy Michigan Plan Enrollment Statistics

Total Healthy Michigan Plan Beneficiaries: 139,774

*Statistics as of April 21, 2014 

Washington State finally wraps things up with their final numbers, breaking 164K QHPs and keeping their Strict Expansion / Woodworker ratio to the same 2:1 ratio that it's been pretty much the entire enrolllment period:

The state has previously reported that 147,000 people signed up for private health coverage, but said Wednesday that the total grew to 164,062 as officials finalized applications after the March 31 deadline. Open enrollment began last October.

Updated enrollment numbers from Oct. 1 to March 31 are included below.

Qualified Health Plans: 164,062

Medicaid Newly Eligible Adults: 285,275

Medicaid Previously Eligible but not Enrolled: 137,930

Not that the raw numbers add up to much, but the 603 total lives covered by SHOP policies is mildly interesting, since it was at only 269 as of 3/31:

30,396 Applications completed in the Individual Marketplace
8,592 Individuals and families enrolled in the Individual Marketplace
568 Employers applied to SHOP Marketplace
603 Employees and dependents enrolled via SHOP Marketplace

This article is interesting not so much because of how close I came to the actual situation in Idaho (I had ID woodworkers pegged at around 5,600; the actual number is more like 5K even), but because of how far off Idaho's own official prediction on "woodworkers" was--they were assuming more than 7x that number:

But even without Idaho expanding its program, experts predicted a surge in Medicaid enrollment. A report prepared for the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare by Milliman Inc. predicted that more than 35,000 people would join Medicaid when they learned they already qualified for it. That was known as the "woodwork" group, for eligible people coming out of the woodwork.

The report said the cost of new enrollment — aside from the expansion — would total about $14.8 million in this fiscal year, then rise to between $32 million and $45 million per year over the next decade. That's not quite what happened, at least in these early months, Shanahan said.

"We just haven't seen the large increases we had expected," he said. Only about 35 percent — 5,000 people — of new Medicaid members are from the "woodwork" group, he said.

In Pennsylvania, the Medicaid "woodworker" effect has been specified as being roughly 18,000 people...which is actually higher than the 13,000+ that I had estimated for PA up until now:

Pennsylvania’s Medicaid enrollment is up by more than 18,000 people since the Oct. 1 launch of the Affordable Care Act’s online health plan marketplaces.

The state's enrollment bump in the program for low-income families and individuals is small, though it coincides with larger jumps being experienced in other Republican-led states. Supporters of the ACA are crediting the 2010 federal health care overhaul with encouraging more uninsured to examine their health coverage options. Subsequently they discover that they were already eligible for state-funded insurance programs.

It’s called the “woodwork” effect — people who may have been eligible for Medicaid or related children’s programs all along only learned of their eligibility during the six-month push to sign Americans up for health insurance.

In other words, they “came out of the woodwork.”

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