Yesterday I posted the MA Health Connector's first weekly dashboard report, in which they confirmed that yes, almost precisely 50% of all QHP determinations are consistently resulting in actual QHP enrollments on that same day. This held true on opening weekend (52%...3,600 out of 6,972) and held firm at 50% even in the first 8 days (14,101 out of 28,175), so I'm now pretty confident that it will stay at least at 50% daily going forward (obviously it should increase as we approach 12/15, which is fine).
Having said that, I can now add two more days to the tally...11/23 & 11/24:
So, that's 14,101 confirmed through 11/22. Add to that 50% of the Monday & Tuesday numbers (4,330 total) and you get an additional 2,165, or 16,266 QHP enrollments total.
OK, it might be slightly lower than 50% even, but certainly above 16K.
I just got off the phone with Christopher Snowbeck of the Star Tribune in Minnesota, who informed me that MN has a rather unique state law which, combined with the company dropping out of the ACA exchange, could have a serious impact on up to 23,500 residents who enrolled in policies via PreferredOne earlier this year.
To recap: MNsure, Minnesota's ACA exchange, enrolled roughly 48,500 people in private policies as of April. Unlike the 16% national attrition rate since then, Minnesota's ACA policies have retained 97% of their enrollments as of October (it's still at around 47,000 as of now out of 55,000 total enrollees to date). About 60% (33,000) of the total were through PreferredOne, although according to my sources, a good 10K of these have already moved on to other types of coverage (either a competitor, ESI, Medicare, Medicaid or whatever).
So, that leaves around 23,500 people still currently enrolled in MNsure-based PreferredOne policies as of October 15th.
Thanks to Bob Doherty for providing links to 2 extremely handy tools from the Kaiser Family Foundation, which break down 2014 QHP ACA exchange enrollments by various demographic criteria.
The state-level spreadsheet is no different from my own 2014 spreadsheet, except that it also includes an updated estimate of the potentialpool of QHP enrollees within each state.
The zip code tool, however, is far more impressive, as it lets you search enrollment data by zip code and then provides all sorts of demographic info within that area (not zip code specifically, but County and "city area"). It tells you what percentage of the potential market has enrolled, and then breaks the numbers down by ethnicity, education level, gender and so on.
The work done on these tools is impressive. However, there are a couple of major problems with them which limit their usefulness:
No 2015 data yet, but at least this has an update to the ACA Medicaid expansion figure for Delaware, tiny though it might be:
In addition to the Health Insurance Marketplace, some residents might be eligible for coverage through Delaware’s expanded Medicaid program, which continues year-round. More than 9,000 individuals have received coverage under the Medicaid expansion in the past year.
OK, not sure if this number runs through Thursday, Friday or Saturday given the conflicting wording ("before the week was over"), so I'm playing it safe and going with Friday:
By Thursday, the exchange had received about 25,000 calls and greeted about 1,800 walk-in visitors at its Contact Center at 70 Royal Little Drive. Meanwhile, the HealthSource RI website received about 35,000 hits, half of them from new visitors, an indicator that many may be first-time customers.
All of that activity resulted in 1,850 renewals and 319 new customers before the week was over.
“We are about where we expected to be at this point,” said Director Christine Ferguson, “but we have a long way to go.”
There's also some updated 2014 data:
As of Nov. 1, two weeks before the start of open enrollment, about 26,300 Rhode Islanders were covered by individual and family plans through HealthSource RI. Another 2,400 people had obtained coverage their small employers offered via the exchange. In addition, close to 70,000 enrolled in Medicaid through HealthSource RI.
Colorado becomes the 14th state with at least partial enrollment data, and as with every other state so far, the opening numbers are very, very good:
State health insurance exchange officials on Monday said 6,144 people have signed up in the first eight days of open enrollment for 2015, well ahead of last year's pace of 204.
The 6,144 sign-ups were predominantly renewals — 4,400 people re-enrolling though Connect for Health Colorado, according to its interim chief executive, Gary Drews.
...Among this year's enrollees, Drews said, 3,400 are receiving financial assistance.
The 936 people who have signed up for dental insurance since Nov. 15 compares favorably with the 87 dental plan enrollments for this period in 2013.
Also glad to see CO breaking out the renewal/new numbers; it'd be a nice touch if every state did so.
This is awesome. Remember how last week I was assuming that roughly 50% of those determined eligible for QHP enrollments likely had already gone ahead and done so each day? At the end of the week I pulled back from this and went with a more cautious 1/3.
Well, it turns out I had it right in the first place: Massachusetts is about to announce 14,101 QHPs actually selected as of Saturday, out of 28,175 determinations (essentially 50% on the nose)!
In addition, they're already up to 23,792 MassHealth (Medicaid) enrollments, which is also excellent.
(link provided soon...it's not even on their website yet!)
For context, Massachusetts is enrolling people in private policies eleven times faster than they did last year...and that includes the December & late March surges.
Put another way, in just 8 days MA has already enrolled about 44% as many people as they did in 200 days last time around.
Crud. The bulk of this article is about how Jonathan "Diarrhea of the Mouth" Gruber was partly behind Colorado's ACA enrollment projections. However, there's one paragraph deep into it which gives me a sad for an entirely unrelated reason:
Connect for Health no longer tracks the Medicaid sign-up numbers, communications director Luke Clarke said. And officials have said also that they do not have a firm indication how many people getting insurance through the exchange used to be uninsured, though the non-profit marketplace was designed to be a primary vehicle for insuring the uninsured.
(sigh) Here I am doing everything I can to improve the transparancy...ah, well...
Recently there was a nonsense survey published by Bankrate which tried to claim that half of the 6.7 million current ACA exchange enrollees have no intention of sticking with the exchanges. What made this particular survey particularly stupid was that it included anyone who had visited one of the exchange websites, not just those who actually, you know, enrolled in a policy through one.
A couple of days ago, a new poll from Morning Consult, which actually surveyed those who are enrolled through the ACA exchanges came up with much more sensible results:
A majority of voters who purchased insurance from an exchange intend to keep their plan for 2015, according to a new poll.
Morning Consult polling found that compared with three months ago, more respondents say they will keep their insurance plans next year. Fifty-two percent of registered voters say they’ll continue with their coverage, compared with 44 percent in September polling.
I posted Connecticut's first week QHP & Medicaid numbers a few days ago. However, thanks to Dan Mangan providing a direct link to the press release itself, I can now add one other data point: SHOP (Small Business) exchange enrollments already have over 1,000 enrolled employees in just the first week of the 2nd Open Enrollment period (1,003 to be precise)!
To get a sense of how dramatic this is, consider that as of July, Access Health CT had only 602 total covered lives in SHOP plans. The distinction between employees and total lives is important, since the latter assumes perhaps 2-3 individuals covered for each employee enrolled.
In other words, 1,003 employees covered likely means perhaps 1,500 - 2,000 actual people covered by those policies...which means that in just one week, Connecticut may already have tripled the total people enrolled in SHOP plans for the full 2014 period.
