The headlines are all buzzing with the announcement of the official grand total of exchange-based QHPs as of midnight yesterday: 7,041,000:
How many people have signed up for private coverage under Obamacare? 7,041,000, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney announced Tuesday afternoon.
But wait, what's this?
That number is likely to rise: It does not include the Monday sign-ups in the 14 states operating their own marketplaces. In addition, the enrollment deadline was relaxed for people having trouble completing the process, so some people could still sign up in the next two weeks.
IF I'm interpreting Mr. Park's words correctly, he's saying that the grand total of exchange QHPs was brought over the 7 million mark even without including the state exchange enrollments for the day.
So, how many more did the 15 state exchanges (well, 14 + DC) bring in?
ST. PAUL, Minn.—MNsure successfully enrolled 169,251 Minnesotans into comprehensive, affordable health insurance plans as of midnight on March 31, bringing the 2014 open enrollment period to a close, MNsure announced today.
“More than 169,000 Minnesotans have enrolled for health coverage through MNsure, blowing past our projection of 135,000 in October,” said MNsure’s interim CEO, Scott Leitz. “I am extremely proud of the MNsure staff who worked tirelessly, often sacrificing time with family over the last year to get Minnesotans enrolled in coverage. Our mission every day has been to make health insurance coverage possible for those Minnesotans who are uninsured and underinsured, including those who have been denied coverage up to now due to pre-existing conditions. Though the rollout of MNsure has not been perfect, we have worked hard to make critical improvements—which we will continue to do through the spring and summer, leading up to our next open enrollment period in November.”
To date, MNsure has enrolled 47,046 Minnesotans in a Qualified Health Plan, 34,219 in MinnesotaCare and 87,986 in Medical Assistance.
Here we go...Rhode Island is the first state-based exchange out of the gate with an (unofficial, but specific) final tally of 3/31 QHP enrollments: Nearly 28,000 by midnight yesterday.
HealthSource RI spokeswoman Dara Chadwick said 27,968 individuals signed up for private plans through the new marketplace between Oct. 1 and the 11:59 p.m. deadline for 2014 enrollment, 1,840 of whom signed up Monday. The number is expected to rise as those who encountered technical difficulties or weren’t able to speak to a representative on Monday finish getting processed.
There's no update on the Medicaid number since March 8th, unfortunately, but this still locks down at least one key number. More to come, no doubt...
From April Ryan, whose "HHS major scoop" batting average is now two out of three (at least since I started following her, anyway):
At 12:01 AM, White House Chief Technology Officer Todd Park acknowledged to QSSI, the Columbia, Maryland firm tasked with fixing Healthcare.gov that the ACA enrollments have surpassed the 7 million mark.
OK, that's pretty cool, but what's with the "holy smokes"? Well, when you listen to the audio clip of the countdown/7M announcement (and do so at the link...it's pretty cool), Todd Park states the following (emphasis mine):
"Outstanding Numbers" has two meanings: The first, of course, is that in spite of everything--the terrible website launch of HC.gov and some of the state sites; the still-terrible status of some of the state sites even now; the actively-hostile opposition and obstructive actions in certain states, the negative spin on every development by some in the news media--in spite of all of this, over 7 million people nationwide enrolled in private, ACA-compliant healthcare plans between 12:01am on 10/1/13 and 11:59pm on 3/31/14...slightly surpassing the original CBO projection for that period.
There's the usual discussions about "But how many have PAID???", "But how many were ALREADY INSURED???", "How many were YOUNG???" and "What METAL LEVEL did they get???" etc etc etc. All of these are reasonable questions for actuaries, accountants and so forth to ask, and the answers will indeed help shape our understanding of what the overall economic and health impact of the law will be.
For the moment, however, none of that matters. This is an outstanding number any way you slice it.
= appx. 22.1 Million People (at the high end) or 14.6 Million (at the low end)
Of course, you can quibble about how many of the 9 million off-exchange QHPs were previously uninsured, or how many of the cancelled plans were swapped out with QHPs from the exchanges vs the off-exchange amount. You can quibble about whether the "sub26ers" should be 3.1 million or only 2.5 million. You can argue bout whether "woodworkers" should "count" or not (as if a massive outreach campaign which encourages previously-eligible people to enroll in a program they qualify for isn't an accomplishment to be proud of). You can argue about whether unpaid QHPs should be counted (yet) or not.
The bottom line is this: No matter how you slice it, this is a ton of people receiving decent healthcare coverage who either a) didn't have anything before or b) can no longer be dropped, denied or bankrupted by coverage that was scattershot, piecemeal or shoddy.
More great news: Specific numbers out of New York, and apparently the 826K figure included about 6K more QHPs than I thought (and 6K fewere on Medicaid, of course):
Since the state website launched on Oct. 1, 826,812 people had signed up for coverage as of 9 a.m. Monday, with 436,304 qualifying for Medicaid and 390,508 obtaining private insurance, she said.
In addition, while I thought the extra 14K total was between 9am and this evening, according to this article 826K was actually the 9am figure, meaning an even higher eventual total. Doesn't really matter at this point, I suppose; the final numbers will all come out soon...
Beating expectations, President Barack Obama's health care overhaul was on track to sign up more than 7 million Americans for health insurance on deadline day Monday, government officials told The Associated Press.
...Two government officials confirmed the milestone, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter ahead of an official announcement.
OK, I've updated the "official projection" to 7,080,180 just for the hell of it, but I'm not trying to pretend that I had this thing nailed to the decimal point; my last real projection was between 6.9M - 7.0M, so I'm willing to divide 7,000,000 into whatever the final number is to find out how far off I am.
Believe me, I'd be perfectly happy if the final number as of 11:59pm ends up being 7.1M, 7.2M or even higher.
