Sunday morning, the big ACA news of the day was HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell announcing that over 100,000 applications had been successfully submitted and processed on Day One of the 2015 Open Enrollment Period.
This is significant news, and I made sure to write a full post about it at around 10am.
However, throughout the day I noticed that an awful lot of people kept confusing 100K applications with 100K enrollments, which is not the same thing. Even the New York Times made this error (quickly corrected thanks to an, um, anonymous tip). As I noted in my post yesterday morning:
I'm as geeked as any ACA supporter, but some context and clarification is important here. Last year there was a lot of confusion about the distinction between someone:
As I posted last night, most of the ACA exchanges seemed to be running pretty smoothly for the launch this year, with two exceptions: CoveredCA, which was having some sort of serious problems throughout the day (I'm not clear how widespread they were), and the Washington Healthplanfinder, which was actually deliberately taken completely offline after only a few hours, and remained offline until this morning:
The problem was noticed during the site’s first hours of operation on Saturday morning, the first day of open enrollment for 2015 plans. The staff decided to take the site down for repairs at 10 a.m.
The good news is that the issue appears to have been fixed, and it didn't impact too many people (of course, that also means that an unknown number of potential enrollees were lost in the interim). In any event, it looks like we also have an unofficial Day One enrollment number, anyway:
Earlier today I had a rather infuriating exchange with someone who's pissed off at the all-new Massachusetts Health Connector because they dare to require him to (wait for it)...re-enter his personal data this year!! Can you believe it?? The nerve!!
I tried giving a reasonable response: Yes, it's annoying, but there could be plenty of reasons why the MA data has to be re-entered. Perhaps the database was corrupted. Perhaps it was hacked and riddled with backdoors. Perhaps it was just in some sort of weird, proprietary format which couldn't be migrated. Perhaps it could have been, but it would've cost gazillions of dollars and/or time more than it already did. Perhaps the MA exchange officials are incompetent (this last was certainly true for Take One, anyway).
But that wasn't good enough for this guy. He wouldn't let it go; kept pestering me about it for like another 15 minutes on Twitter before I finally told him to talk to the MA exchange and leave me out of it. Then I had to block him because he just wouldn't shut up about it.
Yes, that's right. I'm posting a blog entry about exactly one person being enrolled. Let it never be said that I'm not meticulous in documenting my data:
Saturday was the first day of open enrollment in Maryland and around the nation on exchanges created under the Affordable Care Act for people who do not get health insurance through employers. In Maryland, residents received their first shot at gaining coverage at an enrollment fair in Glen Burnie, hosted by the state's nonprofit partner HealthCare Access Maryland.
Banda arrived at 9:22 a.m., 38 minutes early. She was fourth in line. By 9:30 a.m., about a dozen people were waiting, and organizers decided to get the day started early. Less than an hour later, she became the first enrollee on the state's new exchange website. Her plan will cost her $97 a month, she said, and her co-pay will be zero.
"I feel awesome," she said. "It's a relief. I feel that it's going to work for me."
And yes, I've even plugged the number into The Spreadsheet :)
This makes the 5th state-run exchange to report hard numbers for Day One...this brings the verified Day One total to 2,515 QHP enrollees. Again, small but symbolically significant.
MNsure calls Saturday’s open enrollment a big improvement from what happened last year.
As of 3 p.m., 201 people had signed up for health insurance.
On average, customers waited for help a little more than one minute. Last year, the average wait was more than two hours.
More state exchange numbers are starting to trickle in...
The state Cabinet for Health and Human Services said in a release that as of 4 p.m. Saturday, there had been 6,200 unique visitors to the Kynect Web site; 2,415 calls handled by the Kynect contact center; 504 applications submitted; and 368 individuals who had newly enrolled in a qualified health plan.
In addition, 70 visitors to the Kynect store at Fayette Mall in Lexington had completed 33 applications for new coverage.
The "newly enrolled" is important as well, to distinguish it from current enrollees renewing their policies. Hopefully all of the exchanges will be sure to clarify this, but...
Top contributor deaconblues is back in action with three updates today: First up, Hawaii:
HONOLULU — Hawaii's health insurance exchange enrolled more than 40 people on the first day clients were able to sign up to be covered next year.
Another 60 applied for financial assistance to pay for premiums as of mid-afternoon, Jeffrey Kissel, the CEO of Hawaii Health Connector, said Saturday.
The insurance exchange expected to serve over 1,000 clients, either online, over the phone or in person by the time it closed for the day at 8 p.m.
As db notes, and as I noted in my Vermont/Massachusetts post this morning, the numbers may be tiny but it's symbolically very important, especially for the exchanges which had so many technical problems last year. Hawaii didn't get nearly as much press as OR, NV, MA, VT or MD, but they did have severe problems as well.
Combine that with the fact that it's such a small state which already had such a low uninsured population to begin with, and enrolling "only" 40 people or so on Day One is still an important starting point for their 2015 narrative.
I just posted about the first official enrollment numbers coming in from Day One of the 2015 Open Enrollment Period, with small but symbolically important numbers from Vermont and Massachusetts.
I also noted the following passage from today's Boston Globe story about it:
As of 6:30 p.m., 5,967 people had used the Connector website (MAhealthconnector.org) to find out what type of plan they were eligible for.
Of them 2,660 enrolled in MassHealth, the state’s Medicaid program, according to Haberlin, who is senior adviser to Maydad Cohen, the governor’s special assistant for project delivery.
The remaining 3,307 learned they were eligible to shop for a private health insurance. Of those, 1,704 selected a plan and 60 paid online (which is not required until Dec. 23).
So, you have 1,704 actually enrolling ("selecting a plan"), of which--GASP!!--only 60 have paid!!
OK, the numbers are small, but it's a start--and the fact that both are being released by states which had horrible technical issues last year is quite telling:
Vermont Health Connect processed 50 new applications and 201 renewals by Saturday at 1 p.m. The exchange was working well with some isolated minor issues in the morning that were quickly resolved, he said.
MASSACHUSETTS: 1,704 in first day:
#ACA coverage update: 2,660 enrolled in @MassHealth; 3,307 eligible for @HealthConnector coverage with 1,704 plans selected. Total: 5,967
I've rantedseveral times before about the importance of current Obamacare private policy enrollees making sure to actually visit the exchange website, shop around, log into your account and manually re-enroll for 2015, even if nothing has changed at your end (ie, no changes in income, dependents, residence etc).
There are many reasons NOT to auto-renew, most of which are financial in nature. The short version is, you could easily end up paying more than you thought next year by not switching (in addition to premium changes, your tax credit might drop even if your income hasn't changed due to how it's calculated), and you could pay substantially less next year if you do switch to another policy (premiums are actually dropping in many markets).
