The final 2016 Open Enrollment Period exchange-based QHP selection numbers have been posted for just about every state for a couple of weeks now...but until today, there were still 3 states with missing data: Idaho, New York and Vermont.
Unfortunately, both NY and VT are still AWOL, but moments ago Idaho scratched itself off the list with the following press release:
Your Health Idaho Reaches Record Enrollment
Idaho has second largest per capita enrollment in the U.S.
BOISE, Idaho – Your Health Idaho today announced that 102,353 Idahoans have enrolled in Qualified Health Plans for 2016 through the state’s health exchange.
Idaho had just over 97,000 QHP selections last year, so this is about a 5% increase. Not fantastic, but not terrible; this puts ID in between Kansas and New Mexico in terms of year over year enrollment increases.
In any event, I can at least plug in one more data point.
OK, that was possibly the worst headline I've ever written.
So, the insurance carriers have been getting the vapors of late because they're absolutely certain that uninsured off-season Special Enrollment Period (SEP) enrollees are gaming the system, taking advantage of the poor multi-billion dollar insurance carriers' hearts by tracking down the list of Qualifying Life Events (QLEs), shoehorning themselves in so that they're eligible for one of them (or simply lying about having one), signing up for coverage during the off-season, racking up gobs of expensive medical procedures and then kicking the policy to the curb without so much as a promise to call them the next day.
I've already discussed this issue ad nauseum, including point/counterpoints with folks like Richard Mayhew of Balloon Juice, Michael Hiltzik of the L.A. Times and Michael "King v. Burwell" Cannon of the CATO Institute.
My takeaway is that yes, people "gaming" the system probably is happening to some extent, but that there are some fairly simple steps which can be taken to prevent this (or at least to reduce it considerably).
Better yet, they're also making sure to include both the gross enrollment and net effectuated enrollment numbers. If every state exchange (and especially HealthCare.Gov, of course) were to do this, I'd be a very happy man indeed. In the meantime, I'll have to settle for RI's regular updates, although extrapolating anything nationally from a single state with just over 1 million people is a bit tricky.
Unintended Consequences: In the social sciences, unintended consequences are outcomes that are not the ones foreseen and intended by a purposeful action. The term was popularised in the twentieth century by American sociologist Robert K. Merton.
When United States Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia passed away Saturday evening, the reaction from Republican Senators and right-wing political pundits was instant and consistent: President Obama shouldn't be allowed to nominate anyone to replace him (even though that's precisely and specifically one of the responsibilities of the current President of the United States is supposed to do), and if he does so, the U.S. Senate will refuse to even allow the nominee a hearing, much less confirm them.
It's a series of questions, some of which are yes/no, some are checkboxes and so forth about your situation. I've posted screen shots below (note that some of the info is phony for demo purposes):
As of 2/1, total QHPs are 165,123 (49,377 new + 115,746 renewal-active and passive).
However, this number didn't include a few "overtime" days of enrollees, which padded the number a bit more...nor did it include the subtraction of unpaid QHP enrollees (ie, cancellations/purging of enrollees who didn't pay their January premiums in time, were transferred to Medicaid due to income changes and so forth).
On the one hand, I'm kicking myself for not noticing this red flag when the final 2016 Open Enrollment numbers were released last week. On the other hand, I was trying to absorb, analyze and compile a lot of data at the time, so I should cut myself a bit of slack for missing it.
When the numbers were announced, one figure which seemed surprisingly high was that New York (which still hasn't actually released their final numbers yet) apparently enrolled around 400,000 people in their new ACA-created Basic Health Plan (BHP)...and that 300,000 of these folks had supposedly shifted to the BHP program from existing exchange QHP policies.
This did seem surprisingly high to me; I had assumed that instead of NY's QHP total going up around 25% (as I was expecting in most other states), it would stay essentially flat, with the cannibalization by BHPs essentially cancelling out the 100,000 new QHP enrollees I was expecting. 300K making the move was 3x as many as I was expecting. However, in the flurry of other data to crunch, I let this slip by me.
As of this morning, there were still 4 states with some 2016 Open Enrollment data missing: Idaho, Massachusetts, New York and Vermont. The Massachusetts exchange board held their monthly meeting today, so I can cross one more state off the list:
By early February, approximately 201,000 individuals were enrolled in 2016 health coverage.
Over 36,000 new members are enrolled in QHPs. For a frame of reference, our new members amount to about 15% of the size of last year’s estimated uninsured population*
Of the approximately 27,000 new members who indicated a race or ethnicity in their application, about 12% are of Hispanic, Latino or Spanish origin, 8% are African American and 4% are Chinese
We continue to see a high retention rate for our 2015 membership at about 94%
Individuals who selected a plan between January 24th and January 31st still have time to pay for coverage effective March 1, so new membership tied to Open Enrollment may continue to grow
