Yes, that's right: We're quickly approaching the next big deadline: Private policy enrollment in time for coverage starting on February 1st.
Of the 3 monthly deadlines (January 1st start, February 1st start, March 1st start), this is the one getting the lowest amount of hype, for obvious reasons. The December 15th (or December 18, 23 or later, depending on the state) deadline was a huge deal because millions of people had to be renewed (either actively or automatically) in order to avoid any sort of a coverage gap, while a few million more people new to the exchanges jumped on board in time to start 2015 running. By my estimate, there should have been roughly 8.6 million people whose 2015 policies started on Jan. 1st.
My email in box has gotten so crammed full that I'm not even going to include any teaser descriptions this time around. Some of these are weeks or even a month or more old by now; I meant to write up a full entry on some of these but simply didn't have the time, so...
As I noted Saturday, CoveredCA is supposedly going to finally release their full, updated ACA enrollment data between now and Wednesday. So far they've only said that 144K new QHP enrollees have been added, and even that only includes 11/15 - 12/15. They haven't released any data on renewals of the 1.12 million 2014 enrollees yet, nor have they issued any further updates on new additions since Dec. 15th, 4 full weeks ago.
I've noted several times that I'm expecting them to announce roughly 960K renewals (active + automatic) from California, or around 85% of current enrollees to be renewed/re-enrolled. If that proves accurate, that would bring their 12/15 total up to around 1.1 million.
Over the past year, I've stumbled through the rules (some written, some unwritten) regarding confidential sources in journalism--you know: "Off the Record", "On Background", "Embargoed until XX date" and so forth. For the most part, I've figured these rules out, and common sense dictates my approach the rest of the time.
However, please keep in mind that a) I'm not perfect; misunderstandings do happen; b) I'm still naive about some of this stuff and c) even now, this website still isn't my day job; I don't have an editorial or legal department who I can "run things by" other than myself and, on occasion, my wife.
Please keep all of that in mind before you contact me with information which you don't want posted publicly or, alternately if you want the info posted but don't want me to cite you as a source.
As expected, things have quieted down considerably over the weekend. The confirmed QHP selection tally is 85,981 through January 7th. I'm walking back my "% of QHP determinations" a bit from 50% to 45%, which means that out of 5,390 determinations from the 8th - 11th, they should be a minimum of 2,400 more actual QHP selections by now.
That should mean the total up to around 88,400 as of last night, plus 168,130 people confirmed to have been added to Medicaid (MassHealth).
Last night, "60 Minutes" had a segment about Steven Brill's new book, "Bitter Pill", which is an attempt to tell the comprehensive story of how the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) was created.
I don't know much about Brill other than that he did write a compelling account of the technical problems at HealthCare.gov (along with the successful "Apollo 13-style" effort to repair the site) for Time Magazine last fall. Obviously he's a talented writer and he's done a bunch of research. This post isn't about his book itself, which may or may not be brilliant & dead-on target...I haven't read it, so I'm in no position to judge.
This article pretty mostly is a more in-depth explanation of the Medicaid/Medi-Cal situation in California that I wrote about the other day. However, the final line in the article also addresses my other post from a couple of days ago, asking when the heck CA and NY are going to release updated enrollment data (including renewals from 2014, which should account for around 960K in CA alone):
...New enrollment numbers from Covered California for the rest of December will be released next week, exchange officials said, before the exchange board meets Jan. 15.
Woo-hoo! Today is the 10th, tomorrow is Sunday, so they should be coming out with fully-updated (I hope) data from the largest state in the country sometime between Monday & Wednesday.
Not much to say here. The past 2 weeks were both dampened by Christmas (96K for the week) and New Year's (103K for the week). With the holidays out of the way, things should be ramping up again; the only question is by how much? I'm gonna be cautious and go with about a 35% bump over last week, to around 140,000 on the federal exchange, bringing total plan selections to around 6.73 million QHP selections for Healthcare.Gov through tonight (January 9th). As always, I'll be happy to have underestimated a bit.
