This is an interesting example of the fundamental philosophical difference between those who support the ACA and those who oppose it (well, those who oppose it from the Right, anyway; some people oppose it from the Left because they'd prefer Single Payer, Public Option, etc.).
It seems that Illinois has seen Medicaid enrollments shoot up quite a bit more than expected since ACA Expansion officially went into effect on January 1st. This appears to be primarily due to the "woodworker effect", which the article, as a bonus, breaks out specifically: 200K Strict Expansion + 115,000 Woodworkers:
Illinois has added 315,000 people to Medicaid since Jan. 1. Here’s a breakdown:
Two nice finds about Connecticut from contributor deaconblues today. The first article (about CT shopping their successful exchange website package around to other states) gives the QHP enrollment through 3/01 as roughly 58,000; this is up from 53,673 eleven days earlier, an increase of 4,327.
The second article gives the total enrollments as of 2/24 as around 128,000, which suggests around 80,000 Medicaid enrollments, but a little simple math to account for the 5-day difference in the two figures gives the actual Medicaid portion of that as being around 2,100 higher, or 82,100 total. This is an increase of 9,120 people in 6 days.
As of March 1, some 58,000 state residents had signed up for private health insurance through Access Health CT, nearly twice the goal of 33,000 established by federal officials for the entire open enrollment period, which runs through the end of the month, according to Kevin J. Counihan, chief executive of the Connecticut exchange.
At a press conference today, the Secretary of the DHSS announced that Delaware's private QHP enrollments went up 38% in February while Medicaid expansion went up 55%, to 6,994 and 2,168 respectively. Not much in sheer numbers but a nice bump for a small state. This brings Delaware up to 58% of their reasonable 1st year QHP goal of 12,000.
Sec Landgraf says 6,994 Delawareans have enrolled in the marketplace through Feb. 28, up 38% from last month's report. #choosehealthDE
Yesterday the Obama administration announced several new modifications to ACA implementation. The one that's getting the most attention is a 2-year extension on non-compliant, pre-ACA healthcare plans. After getting criticized for "lying" about his "if you like your plan you can keep it" statement last fall, Pres. Obama gave individual states the option of extending existing plans by 1 year if they wanted; this just extends that period further, out to pretty much the end of Obama's term of office:
Americans with health coverage that predates Obamacare can stay on their plans for two more years, insurers will have an extra month to enroll customers next winter and states will get more time to decide whether to manage the law themselves, officials said. Also, a program aimed at covering financial losses for insurers will be adjusted to help ensure it doesn’t cost taxpayers, the Obama administration said.
Another nice find by contributor Denver11. Family Health Hawaii is a new insurance company that is apparently not on the Hawaii exchange, meaning that any enrollments they sign are off-exchange by definition. The article doesn't give a specific number of ACA-compliant plans, leaving it an amorphous "most" out of 3,400. I'm figuring 60%, which would be 2,040 employees. Using my standard (and very conservative) 1.8x people-per-household (per employee) ratio, that comes to around 3,672 total individuals covered.
If I'm not missing something, this brand-new startup company has single-handedly enrolled 80% as many Hawaii residents as the state exchange has. Not sure if this says more about the company or the exchange.
He [Family Health Hawaii CEO JP Schmidt] estimated that around 3,400 employees are enrolled to date, with the goal of enrolling 50,000 employees by the insurer’s five-year mark in 2018. And while the insurer offers some grandmothered 2013 plans, most seem to be opting for the new Affordable Care Act 2014 plans, he noticed.
Nice find by contributor deaconblues; Arizona's Medicaid tally was at around 98,000 on January 10, so this represents a 37% increase to 134,674 total. The "coverage restored" note is a bit confusing, but it sounds like this includes a mixture of "woodworkers" and "baseline churn" while the 3,042 number appears to be part of "pure expansion". However, note that I'm still only counting 20% of the grand total (of which this is just a portion) as "woodworkers" and 50% as "expansion".
If any Arizona Medicaid expert wants to help sort this out, feel free to contact me.
As of February, nearly 64,000 adults eligible for AHCCCS under Arizona voter mandate Prop 204 had their AHCCCS coverage restored. (In total, there are 131,632 Arizonans enrolled in this eligibility category.)
An additional 3,042 adults who were without health insurance were able to access health insurance in the “expansion” eligibility category (those earning between 100-133 percent FPL.)
There hasn't been any sort of press release yet, but the total enrollment figure on the home page of the New York health exchange shot up over 11% today, from 501,205 up to 557,840, a jump of over 56,000 people.
I don't have the Private QHP/Medicaid breakdown yet, but the ratio has quickly shifted from 60 private/40 public through early February to a 23/77 split in favor of Medicaid a couple of weeks ago. I'm going to error on the side of caution and assume that this trend has continued, so I'm going with a 20/80 split for the new additions until the actual numbers are released. I'll be more than happy to be overly cautious on this if the breakout is more favorable to private QHPs, however.
In any event, a 20/80 split would mean the 56,635 additional enrollees break out as 11,327 Private QHPs and 45,308 Medicaid/CHIP, for totals of 288,008 & 269,832 respectively.
For months now, I've been pointing out that while the CBO's original 7 million overall Private QHP projection seemed reasonable at the time, the CMS's state-by-state projections to achieve that 7 million goal never made any sense, and in some cases were flat-out ludicrious. States like New York and Kentucky were assigned the same enrollment target even though NY's population is 4.5x the size of KY's, and so on.
Even within individual states this made no sense--Vermont was expected to have 57,000 people enroll in QHPs even though they only have around 47,000 uninsured residents. Sure, there'll be some overlap due to the "5 million policies cancelled!!" debacle (ie, people switching from a non-ACA compliant plan to a compliant one, including my own family), but it still made little sense, and in fact the odds are very high that someone simply copied & pasted Utah's projection numbers onto Vermont, right below it.
I know Hawaii has a small population to begin with, and a very small number of uninsured residents out of those, but this is still a bit underwhelming: Private QHPs are up less than 200 from 2/22 to 3/01, to 4,661.
Total since October 1, 2013
20,018 Applications completed in the Individual Marketplace
4,661 Enrollments in the Individual Marketplace
Using my new (upcoming) "potential pool" methodology, after removing undocumented immigrants and assuming that 60% of QHP enrollees were previously uninsured, Hawaii is now at:
2,797 out of 35,000 potential QHP enrollees (8%)
14,746 out of 58,000 potential Medicaid/CHIP enrollees (25.4%)
Colorado continues to be one of the more smoothly-running state exchanges, adding 5,102 Private QHPs and 7,341 new Medicaid enrollees in the 2nd half of February. These represent a 6.4% and 5.7% increase respectively. Unfortunately, their daily QHP rate for February, which had looked to be slightly higher than January, was actually down about 8% per day. As always, in CO, the Medicaid number listed only includes actual ACA expansion (woodworkers are included separately in the CMS reports; there are no renewals or churn the number below).
Here's a bonus data tidbit that's also a precursor to a new feature that I'm adding later this week: Out of the total uninsured in the state, Colorado has a potential QHP pool of around
325,000 residents, and a potential Medicaid pool of around 332,000 people, once you remove undocumented immigrants.
Assuming 60% of QHP enrollees were previously uninsured, this means Colorado has enrolled:
This is an interesting example of the fundamental philosophical difference between those who support the ACA and those who oppose it (well, those who oppose it from the Right, anyway; some people oppose it from the Left because they'd prefer Single Payer, Public Option, etc.).
Two nice finds about Connecticut from contributor deaconblues today. The first article (about CT shopping their successful exchange website package around to other states) gives the QHP enrollment through 3/01 as roughly 58,000; this is up from 53,673 eleven days earlier, an increase of 4,327.
At a press conference today, the Secretary of the DHSS announced that Delaware's private QHP enrollments went up 38% in February while Medicaid expansion went up 55%, to 6,994 and 2,168 respectively. Not much in sheer numbers but a nice bump for a small state. This brings Delaware up to 58% of their reasonable 1st year QHP goal of 12,000.
Nice find by contributor deaconblues; Arizona's Medicaid tally was at around 98,000 on January 10, so this represents a 37% increase to 134,674 total. The "coverage restored" note is a bit confusing, but it sounds like this includes a mixture of "woodworkers" and "baseline churn" while the 3,042 number appears to be part of "pure expansion". However, note that I'm still only counting 20% of the grand total (of which this is just a portion) as "woodworkers" and 50% as "expansion".
