On Christmas Day I posted "New ACA Attack: "But how many have actually PAID???" in which I pointed out that unless there prove to be significant technical issues preventing large numbers of premium payments from going through, this is pretty weak tea in terms of being an anti-ACA talking point...or at least it won't have any teeth to speak of until after January 10th, the date which most insurance companies have agreed to extend their January payment deadlines out to.
However, in the interest of completeness, I did point out that in at least one case (Washington State), the enrollment numbers are indeed broken out between paid and unpaid; specifically, 65,000 out of 134,000 total enrollments had been paid, or 48.5%. The next day, Nevada's numbers came out and once again, 49% (6,219 out of 12,740) were paid. So the short answer I gave at the time was "almost half of enrollees have paid."
In 2012, more than 50 million Americans lacked any form of health insurance. The Affordable Care Act was enacted into law in order to reduce that number. This website aims to give an accurate picture of how much.
In April this year, after the six-month open enrollment period has ended, it will be interesting to examine the statistics. Foremost among those numbers, in the minds of political pundits, will be how many Americans enrolled in private health plans? We will then know whether we reached, surpassed or fell short of the 7,066,000 enrollments projected by the Congressional Budget Office – long since elevated to a “target” rather than the projection it was.
How many more people are insured?
As we start this new year, at least 2.1 million people will be covered by new private plans, roughly 30 % of CBO’s first-year projection. However, this is by no means the only key figure. More than 4 million people are embraced by the Medicaid expansion. In addition, an estimated 3.1 young adults are now insured though their parents’ health plans. That adds up to 9.2 million people, which is a respectable start and should significantly reduce the number of uninsured. However, it must be underscored that many complex factors make it impossible to quantify that reduction, at least for the time being.
On top of that are an unknown number of people who have purchased ACA-compliant insurance plan off-exchange, i.e. directly from the insurance company. There are strong indications that total is significant – and we’ll return to that issue.
Mississippi:Private up to 2,000 from 802(h/t Steve Mullinax, aka rsmpdx)
Transcript from Jeffrey Hess of Mississippi Public Radio, NPR Audio:
Only two insurance companies are offering plans in Mississippi, and they only overlap in four of the state’s 82 counties. However, those two companies appear to be betting that the web site problems and skepticism about the exchange in general are passing. One of the two companies, Humana, launched a late-December ad campaign to drive more people to the site, says spokesman Mitch Lubitz. “There’s been a ramp-up as the HealthCare.gov web site has gotten easier to use and there have been other options for people to go on and get information and enroll.” Mississipi’s Insurance Commissioner Mike Chaney says the improvements to the enrollment process are good, but he’s still skeptical they’ll be able to get enough people signed up this year. “From zero to ten, I’d give it a confidence level of about a three.” Hess: “That’s still not very good.” Chaney: “That’s not, but it’s better than where I was, a one, a week before last. “Chaney says the unofficial count is around two thousand people enrolled, but he says if the confidence trend continues upward, his confidence will rise to a five.”
I have a dozen or so submitted updates to check into, so hopefully I'll have a lot to add tomorrow, but otherwise I'm spending a quiet New Year's Day curled up in front of James & the Giant Peach and Hugo with my family.
Two quick last-minute updates before the ball drops on 2013:
Rhode Island: private enrollments up to 9,800 (h/t to Betsy Cazden aka rugbymom)
Individuals and families had until the end of the day Tuesday to enroll throughHealthSource RI for coverage beginning Wednesday. About 9,800 people had signed up from Oct. 1 through Dec. 28 for commercial plans offered in the marketplace. It was not immediately clear how many of them were previously uninsured.
As Ms. Cazden notes: "We were at a bit over 5,000 at the end of November, so this means it's almost doubled. Our CBO target number is 12,000, which we're on track to hit by mid-January at this pace....there will be more numbers coming out since people can sign up until midnight tonight (12/31)."
NOTE: This was originally posted over at Daily Kos. I've since ported it over here for archival purposes.
Sorry to disappoint everyone, but I've run into my first major data error (to my knowledge) in weeks.
Read the whole blog post for details, but the short version is that I had Minnesota up to 125K total (50K private, 75K public), when it turns out that those numbers should only be 19,420 and 33,759 respectively. It also means that last week's Minnesota numbers were wrong as well.
I've already corrected the spreadsheet; this means the total is 30,580 less than I had it last night.
My apologies for the error...which came on the same day that a White House representative apparently mentioned me by name on MSNBC this morning. Lovely.
Oh, I should note that I know I promised an update to the IA/NE numbers and how this relates to "off-exchange" enrollments, but between the Minnesota correction and the actual paying work that I'm way behind on (you know, my job and all...) that'll have to wait until later today (I hope).
In a conference call earlier today, the HHS announced a few things, most of which I already knew, but a few new items. First, they confirmed the 2.1M private enrollment figure which ACASignups has been projecting for a week now (my original prediction was 2.0M by 12/24 and up to 2.3M by midnight tonight, but that was before several states extended their enrollment deadliens; I changed this to 2.1M who will have their coverage start on January 1st).
They also confirmed the 3.9M Medicaid/CHIP enrollments through 11/30 (not surprising since I had already gotten that number from them anyway) and the 3.1M "Under-26'ers" on their parents plans thanks to the ACA.
To be honest, there wasn't a whole lot of new information given out. The most interesting news is that they've gotten both CVS and Walgreens to agree to some sort of special "transitional phase policy" regarding prescriptions and other pharmacy transcations; the gist of it is that for a short period of time (A week? Two weeks? They didn't specify), you'll be able to get prescriptions filled and so forth from CVS or Walgreens as long as you provide some sort of proof of your insurance coverage, even if it's not in their regular system yet. I didn't catch what sort of proof would be required, but this makes sense and is a smart move under the circumstances.
Last night I teased that I'd be providing some context and insight into the Iowa and Nebraska updates posted on the spreadsheet, and I still plan on doing so later today. However, there's been an interesting development over at Minnesota which I need to address first.
Yesterday, Jackie Crosby of the Minnesota StarTribune posted "MNsure grids for late crush of enrollees", which among other things gave an update on the MNsure enrollment numbers, stating:
More than 53,000 Minnesotans have bought coverage as of last Friday, with the biggest gains coming from those buying private health plans on the individual market. By Friday, 19,420 had signed up for individual or family plans; 12,051 had been enrolled in Medical Assistance; and 12,708 were getting coverage through MinnesotaCare.
So far, fair enough. However, in the original version of the article posted yesterday, there were two more paragraphs immediately following this. The first paragraph specified that these enrollments actually represented about 125,000 actual people (i.e., additional family members, etc). It also specified that about 20,000 of those were being held up due to paperwork issues and so forth. The next paragraph stated that around 3,900 people had completed enrollment but hadn't actually paid their first premiums yet.
Yesterday morning's big news, of course, was that the Federal ACA exchange (covering 36 states) is now up to over 1.1 million private healthcare plan enrollees. Today brings 4 new state-level updates...and a teaser for two others you probably weren't expecting to see.
New York:
Today's big news is in New York,which announced that they're up to a total of 241,522 enrollees in either private plans or Medicaid/SCHIP expansion. They haven't broken out the number yet, but based on the split in the previous update (156K private, 58K Medicaid/SCHIP) I'm going with a 73% private / 27% Medicaid split until more specific info is released. This increases NY's private enrollments to 176K, up 20K from last week. h/t to Buenaventura for being the first to notify me.
Connecticut:
Connecticut issued a formal press release which includes their final 12/23 deadline enrollment tally for 1/1/14 plan coverage. The total is only slightly higher than what I had (34,295 instead of 34,000 even); the noteworthy part of the announcement is that they've confirmed ACASignups.net's declaration of CT as the first state to surpass their original CBO enrollment projection. CBO had them achieving 33,000 private enrollments by 3/31/14; instead they've managed to break through that number in less than half the 6-month enrollment period. Given the poor October performance of the ACA exchanges as a whole, this is an amazing development.
NOTE: This was originally posted over at Daily Kos. I've since ported it over here for archival purposes.
Yesterday morning's big news, of course, was that the Federal ACA exchange (covering 36 states) is now up to over 1.1 million private healthcare plan enrollees. Today brings 4 new state-level updates...and a teaser for two others you probably weren't expecting to see.
New York:
Today's big news is in New York, which announced that they're up to a total of 241,522 enrollees in either private plans or Medicaid/SCHIP expansion. They haven't broken out the number yet, but based on the split in the previous update (156K private, 58K Medicaid/SCHIP) I'm going with a 73% private / 27% Medicaid split until more specific info is released. This increases NY's private enrollments to 176K, up 20K from last week. h/t to Buenaventura for being the first to notify me.
