Vermont issues Individual & Sm. Group Market Enrollment Reports; Indy down 1.2%

During the 2019 Open Enrollment Period, Vermont enrolled 25,223 people in on-exchange ACA individual market policies.

Just today, the state's ACA exchange, Vermont Health Connect, released a breakout of their January 2020 individual and small group market enrollment data as compared with January 2019.​​​​​​

The total number of Individual Market enrollees is 33,982 enrollees as of the end of January. It's important to understand that this is not the same as the number of people who enrolled on the ACA exchange during Open Enrollment, for two reasons: First, 2020 OEP in Vermont ended on December 15th, 2019; this data is as of January 31st. Second, the tables below include both on- and off-exchange enrollees, as opposed to on-exchange only.

The 34K figure is actually more accurate in terms of understanding changes in Vermont's individual and small group markets, but it's not the same number counted by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid (CMS) for purposes of the "official" Open Enrollment report, which will only included the on-exchange number as of 12/15/19 for Vermont.

Having said that, from the look of things, it's safe to say that the official CMS number is likely to be very close to 25,000 again this year regardless. The overall individual market is down around 1.2% (414 fewer people), and while there's definitely been a shift away from Silver (down 10.8%) over to Bronze (up 11.7%) and Gold (up 8.1%), there's no way of telling whether those shifts are on or off-exchange...with one exception: The "Reflective Silver" policies are exclusively off-exchange. That number did increase by 121 people.

If you remove Reflective Silver from the totals, you get 31,772 in January 2019 and 31,237 in January 2020. That's a drop of 1.7%. If that's representative of the on-exchange enrollments overall, the official CMS figure should end up being something like 24,800 people, give or take.

Unfortunately I still don't know the exact on-exchange 12/15 figure for Vermont, but until I do, I'm going to use 24,800 as a placeholder on my spreadsheet.