New York Breaks 412K total; 66% NOT previously insured!

Ahead of the full January report expected from the HHS Dept. sometime this week, the NY State of Health (New York's exchange) gave out two key numbers. Total enrollments have gone up by over 8% in the past week (from 380,747 to 412,221), which is a nice bump...but the more significant news (politically speaking) is the announcement that 2/3 of those were not previously insured.

ALBANY (Feb. 10, 2014) – NY State of Health (NYSOH), the State’s official health plan marketplace, reported that as of 9 a.m. today, 696,880 New Yorkers have completed their applications and 412,221 have enrolled for coverage since the launch of the Marketplace on October 1, 2013. Sixty-six percent of New Yorkers who have enrolled to date were uninsured at the time of application....

"We are thrilled to see that more than 412,000 people have enrolled for quality, low-cost health insurance and nearly 697,000 have completed applications since the Oct. 1 launch of the marketplace. Also, 66 percent of enrolled New Yorkers were uninsured when they applied,” Donna Frescatore, executive director of NY State of Health, said.

Of the 412,221 total enrollees, 251,306 opted for private coverage and 160,915 people qualified for Medicaid, the government’s program for low-income individuals. Nearly 697,000 people in the state have also completed applications under ObamaCare but are not yet enrolled.

Note that the "66% not previously insured" doesn't specify whether this applies to Private QHPs only or the combined Private+Medicaid number, so it's theoretically possible that, say, 100% of Medicaid enrollees are new while only 44% of Private QHP enrollees were, but it's unlikely to be that skewed.

Even if that proves to be the case, this still completely blows away the "only 11% uninsured" claim from a McKinsey & Co./WSJ survey a few weeks back. True, the 66% figure only represents New York; it's certainly possible that it isn't representative of the country at large, but NY is the 3rd largest state, representing over 6.3% of the total U.S. population.

It's already been pointed out that NY is likely to have a higher percentage of previously-uninsured people than other states since their pre-ACA premiums were already so high; this may be true, and again, there are other demographic factors at play here. Even in a worst-case scenario, however, I have to figure that the national "previously uninsured" rate would still be somewhere in the 40-50% range.

Plus, again, this DOES NOT INCLUDE direct (off-exchange) Private QHP enrollments, which is where I'm guessing most of the "OMG!! 5M POLICIES CANCELLED!!" folks went. Unfortunately, I've been able to root out only a small fraction of these enrollments so far (around 124K), since that data is proprietary to the individual insurance companies and co-ops.