As I keep hammering over and over, asking "How many have PAID??" is a perfectly reasonable question to ask...as long as you a) wait until after the payments in question are actually due and b) you make sure to be as comprehensive as possible, since payment rates can vary from state to state or even insurer to insurer.
If you don't, you end up with a big ol' pile of crap like the infamous GOP House Energy & Commerce Committee "report" from back in April which tried to claim only a 67% first month payment rate when the actual rate ended up being around 88%.
The good news: Enrollment in the ACA private Medicaid option program is up to 218K, about 7,000 higher than it was as of mid-October.The bad news: With the state legislature & governor's office being completely overrun by Republicans, the future of the program isn't looking great:
This may seem a bit anticlimactic after this morning's Healthcare.Gov news, but it actually just serves to underscore how great the 2015 open enrollment period is doing so far:
Again, assuming roughly 50% of all QHP determinations are already resulting in plan selections the same day (which was consistent for at least the first 8 days), this means that total QHP selections should be roughly: 16,186 + 3,770 + 15,562 = 35,518 x 0.5 = 17,759. Lop off a couple hundred to err on the side of caution and Massachusetts should have roughly 17,500 or more QHPs selected already.
Once again: In 2014 they only hit 32K total in 6.5 months.
Meanwhile, ACA Medicaid can claim credit for nearly 31,000 more people being added to the tally.
As noted ad infinitum, the 462K QHPs selected (aka "total" enrollments) do not mean paid enrollments. As I've noted many, many times before, the first premium payments for January aren't even due for a month and a half and even then, many insurance companies allow a grace period. Most people don't pay their cable or electric bill until just before it's due, so for the love of God, don't start with the "But how many have PAID???" nonsense until around mid-January (and even then, that will only apply to those whose policies start on January 1st. Don't start huffing & puffing about 1st premium payment rates for the total 2/15/15 number until at least March 15th or so, m'kay???)
The Obama administration says that nearly a half-million people selected insurance plans throughHealthcare.gov during the first week of Obamacare open enrollment, in mid-October. Nearly half (48 percent) were new customers who had not previously purchased coverage last year, suggesting that the law could widen its reach to more uninsured Americans in year two of coverage expansion.
The new numbers, released by Health and Human Services Wednesday, show a faster start to open enrollment this year than in 2013. Last year, during Healthcare.gov's botched launch, only 106,185 consumers selected health insurance plans during the entire first month of enrollment.
...These figures do not include those consumers using the 14 state-based exchanges, in places like California and New York, where the federal government does not run the insurance marketplace.
And they also do not necessary show total enrollment: those who selected a plan still need to send a first month's premium to their insurance plan in order for their coverage to kick in on January 1.
6 days ago, after the revelation that the HHS Dept. had overstated the actual number of people currently enrolled in ACA exchange healthcare policies by 393,000 people by double-counting dental plans, I posted a screed in which I blasted them for "jerking me around". At the time I assumed that they had deliberately padded the number in an attempt to keep the official number above the "magic" 7 million threshold.
I closed my diatribe with the following:
I'm going to continue updating the site because I believe that the Affordable Care Act, with all of its flaws and shortcomings, is still an important and substantial improvement over the system that we had before it.
I just wish that you guys had enough confidence in your own policies not to embellish the metrics...especially when they stand on their own just fine.
OK, I almost always cite my sources on data points, but in this case I can't. On the other hand, it's not anything eyebrow-raising either; someone in a position to know has confirmed that at least 1,000 people had enrolled in QHPs via at least one insurer in Pennsylvania as of 11/19.
Considering that PA enrolled over 300,000 people last year, and there are 10 companies participating on the exchange in the state anyway, this isn't a particularly shocking data point, so I'll leave it there, but I can at least add it to the spreadsheet for Pennsylvania, anyway.
I know I've been saying that the worst-performing state exchanges from last year seem to be overperforming this year, but this is still a jaw-dropper. Maryland has done a complete turnaround this year:
As of Nov. 24, 2014, more than 25,000 Marylanders have enrolled in quality and affordable health coverage since the open enrollment period began on Nov. 15.
With the successful launch of the upgraded MarylandHealthConnection.gov website, 25,780 individuals have enrolled, including 14,749 enrolled in qualified health plans and 11,031 in Medicaid. From Nov. 15 to Nov. 24, 32,744 consumer accounts were created; 29,546 calls were made to the Consumer Support Center, and 79,681 visited the application portal on the website.
For comparison: Last year, Maryland enrolled a total of 67,757 people in 6 1/2 months. They've now achieved 22% of that total in just 10 days.
