The final 2016 deadline to enroll in a qualifying healthcare plan for policies starting coverage as of March 1st officially ended as of MIDNIGHT on January 31st.
As usual however, there are a few caveats to this...but not as many as the past two years:
While this isn't an official update, yesterday they posted this blog entry, pushing today's deadline for February coverage (again, the final deadline for coverage starting in March is still January 31st, like every other state):
Washington Healthplanfinder has seen a continued increase in sign-ups as residents coming into the final days of open enrollment. An additional 11,000 customers have selected new or renewed health plans since the start of the new year, bringing the total number of sign-ups to 180,000 since open enrollment began on Nov. 1.
On a related note, earlier today I wrote about being proven correct in my projection that while the projected average 2016 premium rate hikes would end up being around 12-13% nationallyif everyone renewed their existing policies, if enough people shopped around, the national average would likely end up coming in below 10% after all.
Sure enough, the 8.5 million who enrolled via HC.gov through Christmas (which is likely to be over 60% of the total) ended up with an effective average rate hike of...just 9.1%.
Here's how it breaks out state by state. It doesn't include the state-based exchanges like California, Colorado, etc, nor are any enrollees since 12/26 included, but it still gives a pretty good picture of the overall situation. As you can see, 6 states did get slammed with 20% or higher hikes (ouch), while 10 states came in with increases of less than 5%, and two of them (Indiana and Maine) actually have lower rates on average than last year.
Again, these numbers will likely shift up or down slightly after the remaining enrollees are added in (likely around 5.5 million nationally), but for now, this is where things stand.
But actually, he thought as he re-adjusted the Ministry of Plenty’s figures, it was not even forgery. It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another. Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connexion with anything in the real world, not even the kind of connexion that is contained in a direct lie. Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version. A great deal of the time you were expected to make them up out of your head. For example, the Ministry of Plenty’s forecast had estimated the output of boots for the quarter at 145 million pairs. The actual output was given as sixty-two millions. Winston, however, in rewriting the forecast, marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for the usual claim that the quota had been overfulfilled. In any case, sixty-two millions was no nearer the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than 145 millions. Very likely no boots had been produced at all. Likelier still, nobody knew how many had been produced, much less cared. All one knew was that every quarter astronomical numbers of boots were produced on paper, while perhaps half the population of Oceania went barefoot.
According to the McKinsey Center report, the nationwide weighted average increase is 11.7%, slightly below my 12-13% estimate. Unlike the Avalere Health report, the McKinsey study appears to be more of a true apples-to-apples comparison:
It includes all 50 states, plus DC.
It includes all Silver plans, not just the lowest-priced one.
It includes all Metal Levels as well as Catastrophic.
In fact, the only significant differences between the McKinsey Center report and mine are:
My estimate includes off-exchange ACA-compliant policies as well as exchange-based ones
My estimate attempted to look at the average change as opposed to the median change (the distinction of which, admittedly, is often difficult to remember)
Regardless, I think it's safe to say that my 12-13% estimate is on pretty damned safe ground.
Last night I bit the bullet and posted a "quasi-endorsement" for Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Presidential Primary. I say "quasi" because I never came right out and actually stated that I think other people should choose her over Bernie Sanders. What I said was that I have serious concerns about her, but when it comes to the subject of healthcare, I find myself coming to the conclusion that as much as I may support a single payer (or some similar type of universal coverage) healthcare plan, I just find Sen. Sanders's just-released plan to be a) too vague even as a broad, general outline and b) too unrealistic even as a negotiating starting point.
While the response in the comments here has been calm and reasonable, the response from some Sanders supporters over at Daily Kos was...well, "passionate", to put it mildly. Many people were supportive, some offered reasonable rebuttals and counter-arguments...but a certain subset accused me of being a Hillary shill, a GOP stooge and so forth, claiming that I never actually supported single payer in the first place (and that I don't now, even though it was the approach and timeline which I was debating, not whether SP is the way to go at all).
Add 290K to that and you're up to roughly 1.476 million people.
My official target for California is 1.80 million, so CoveredCA has reached 82% of where I was expecting them to be by now...which is right in line with where I think things stand nationally.
For the record, that also means 93,616 renewals from last year.
They also confirmed later that these numbers are as of 1/19, so that's an additional 4,467 in 14 days, or 319 per day on average.
They'll almost certainly reach their own target of 105K - 115K QHPs, but to achieve my target of 125K they'll have to ramp things up to over 1,300 per day for the remaining 12 days of open enrollment, which is probably pushing it (120K might be doable, however).
Maryland had previously reported just over 150,000 QHPs as of 12/28/15, so this sounds about right: Around 5,000 more people in the first 3 weeks of January, with 10 days left to go (I'm not sure what date the 155K figure is through, I'll assume that's as of last night). That's roughly 220 per day.
Assuming no final week surge of any sort, Maryland should add roughly 2,200 more people by the 31st, but I'm guessing it'll be closer to another 5K, for perhaps 160K in the end.
UPDATE 1/21/16: Updated to include new data from Colorado, Maryland, Connecticut and California.
I launched the "State by State" chart feature towards the end of the 2015 Open Enrollment period last time around, and it proved to be pretty popular, so I've brought it back this year.
Note that whle the enrollment numbers for most states below are current through January 16th, most of the state-based exchanges are either slightly more current or up to three weeks behind.
