I just noted this morning that Rhode Island's enrollment numbers for 2017 are coming up significantly short of not only my own admittedly unrealistic hopes (I was hoping RI would buck the national trend and beef up enrollment by 15% this year), but is likely to actually come up lower than last year's 33.9K by several thousand people.
Fortunately, the opposite is proving to be the case in Massachusetts:
Through yesterday, we had 240,745 enrolled in January 2017 coverage...these are people who paid their bill. There are an additional 11,803 people who selected a plan but haven't paid for it yet. That's a total of 252,548.
That's, 252,548 QHP selections as of 12/28/16, of which over 95% have actually paid their first monthly premium (well above the 90% payment national average).
Rhode Island is one of three states (along with Washington and Massachusetts) which allowed people to enroll for January coverage as late as December 23rd. RI's numbers have also included auto-renewals for some time now, so today's report includes everyone whose 2017 policies will kick off effective this Sunday, January 1st:
INDIVIDUAL AND FAMILY ENROLLMENT • As of December 24, 2016
Oof. I've been compiling a lot of charts and graphs the past week or so based on what I thought were the most comprehensive 2017 enrollment numbers available to date. The biggest data gaps are Vermont and New York, neither of which has released any enrollment data yet...or so I thought.
In the past three days, more than 55,000 New Yorkers have enrolled or renewed coverage through NY State of Health. The Customer Service Center has answered more than 1,000,000 calls since the start of Open Enrollment on November 1 and an average of 46,000 calls a day this week. The NY State of Health website has also experienced high traffic reaching 12,000 users in peak hours.
...This is also the first time this enrollment period that NYSoH has released any actual enrollment data: 55,000 renewals + new signups. Unfortunately, that number only includes 12/12 - 12/14...no earlier numbers are included. Still, I'll take what I can get...
The last hard enrollment number I had for Connecticut was 108,105 people enrolled through December 13, just 2 days before the original deadline for January coverage. However, like most states, CT bumped their deadline out an extra few days, so they ended up with 4 more days to sign people up before the January cut-off. It turns out they tacked on another 5,000 people in that time:
Access Health CT, the organization responsible for enrolling people in Obamacare, did not release numbers on how many people are enrolled in policies that take effect Jan. 1. Instead, they released a combined number of who's enrolled now and who will be enrolled next year: 113,161.
...Access Health CT noted that nearly 12,000 people who are currently enrolled are in plans that will not exist next year and are therefore not covered. They can still re-enroll, but they'll have a gap in coverage in January.
At this point in 2015, 100,314 people were scheduled to have Obamacare insurance coverage on Jan. 1, 2016.
With the HHS Dept. having just released the total number of 2017 Open Enrollment Period enrollees through the extended December deadline, I've been seeing a lot of comments on Twitter along the following:
Florida, Texas, North Carolina, Georgia highest Obamacare enrollees... lol... Trumpers should have listened!#ACA#lawrenceodonnell
There could be a light at the end of a dark tunnel for Obamacare insurers.
Health insurers may finally be seeing improved results on their Obamacare plans just as a newly elected president is poised to follow through on promises to end the controversial coverage program, a new report suggests.
An analysis out Thursday says that health insurers are expected in 2016 "to start reversing" financial losses on their Obamacare business after "hitting bottom" in 2015.
And 2017 "will likely see continued improvement" for those insurers selling individual health plans, "with more insurers getting close to breakeven or better," according to the report by Standard and Poor's Global Ratings.
The report also says big price increases for Obamacare plans in 2017 were likely a "one-time pricing correction."
I did this for the heck of it back in 2015 and it's become sort of an annual tradition for me. On the one hand, with the 4th year added this layout is starting to get too confusing. On the other hand, it's looking very much like this will be the final year of ACA open enrollment anyway, so I guess that's a moot point.
It's important to bear in mind that the first Open Enrollment Period (for 2014 coverage) lasted a whopping six months...and even that was extended by 15 days due to the massive technical problems during the October 2013 launch period. Technically speaking, the 2014 open enrollment period lasted a total of 197 days, which has been time-compressed so the starting and ending dates match the other three years. That 15-day extension is also why the first big "surge" appears to come earlier on the graph than it actually did--it's been "pushed back" a bit.
As noted in my "Week 7 Plus" December Deadline Snapshot Report write-up, along with the updated State-by-State write-up, while I was dead on target in predicting enrollments up through the original 12/15 deadline at HC.gov, I seriously overestimated the additions who signed up during the 4-day "extension period". I figured it'd be anywhere from 750K - 1.0M; instead it was just 350,000 or so. However, since there are still several million auto-renewals left to be added to the mix, this doesn't necessarily mean anything; it could simply be a half-million or so more auto-renewals instead of active renewals will be added later this week.
I've confirmed 8.8 million QHP selections nationally to date. That leaves almost exactly 5.0 million more enrollees needed to reach this year's target of 13.8 million by January 31st. A pretty tall order, but we can cut that down to size:
IMPORTANT: The total enrollment numbers for the 39 HC.gov states are quite a bit behind last year. However, this is mainly because auto-renewals haven't been added to the totals yet for those 39 states yet. This makes it impossible to do an apples-to-apples comparison vs. last year for those states.
Since auto-renewals have already been added to most of the state-based exchange numbers but not to the federal exchange numbers, it gets a little tricky to visualize. The blue sections show how far ahead 11 states are based on their status. I'd expect any state which has already added in their auto-renewals to have reached around 85% of my final target, while those which haven't added them to the tally should only be at around 65%.
Based on that, among the states with auto-renewals baked in:
Today, as part of a deadline reminder press release (WA is among 3 states which are still letting people sign up for January coverage as late as midnight Friday), they gave a rough update:
The Washington Health Benefit Exchange today is warning customers without 2017 coverage that this Friday, Dec. 23 at 11:59 p.m. is the deadline to sign up for health and dental plans through Washington Healthplanfinder that begin on Jan. 1.
