"Get him out of my sight, Lou! I want him in town, though. He's still under contract. I want you in town, Fink...and out of my sight." --Barton Fink
The big ACA story Thursday morning was about UnitedHealthcare announcing that while they're still available across half the country for 2016, they may drop out of the ACA exchanges next year (2017). Furthermore, they're cutting their marketing/promotional efforts for the exchanges and, in an additional exclusive tidbit from myself, they've also informed their commission-based brokerage network that they'll be slashing their commission rates by as high as 80% for exchange-based enrollments. On top of that, they've even supposedly deliberately disabled various database tools used specifically by brokers to assist in helping people sign up for UHC policies through the exchanges.
The monthly Access Health CT board meeting is taking place right now; they've posted a few key data tweets. I'll update if anything else relevant is tweeted out:
James Michel, Director of Operations, has shared that 13,300 new accounts have been created & 5,470 individuals have enrolled in QHP plans.
UPDATE: I've gotten the OK from my source, Joshua Dickerson, to give him a public should-out for the heads up.
Regular readers know that although I do spend a lot of time updating this website, I do still have to do my day job running a website development firm. As a result, I'm simply not able to keep up with every healthcare-related hot tip which comes my way.
UnitedHealthcare Announces Changes to 2016 Exchange Sales and Compensation
Over the past few months, we've seen an acceleration of changes in the health insurance market. UnitedHealthcare is continually evaluating all aspects of the evolving exchanges so that we can provide coverage options that best meet consumers' health care and financial needs.
Remember a few weeks ago when the right-wing Heritage Foundation published a study which tried to claim that only 3% of the net increase in Americans with healthcare coverage due to the first year of the Affordable Care Act exchanges was via private individual policies, with a crazy-high 97% of it allegedly coming from Medicaid expansion?
Remember how the only basis for this argument was an extremely shaky claim that employer-sponsored insurance had supposedly dropped by 4.5 million people from 2013 to 2014 (which supposedly cancelled out all but 260,000 of the private policy gains)??
Plug 'em all in ad you have the following: 1.17 million QHP selections confirmed nationally from 43 states out of around 1.76 million estimated nationally to date.
Covered California has a slightly annoying policy (they did this last year as well) of not publicizing how many current QHP enrollees have renewed their policies (or switched to a different exchange-based one) until well after the December deadline has passed.
As of Nov. 17, approximately 6,000 new enrollees had elected to purchase a family dental plan at the time of enrollment. In addition, more than 27,000 current members had chosen to purchase a family dental plan at the time of renewal.
Covered California also announced Wednesday that more than 34,000 new consumers had selected a health insurance plan through the exchange since open enrollment began.
By my reckoning, total national QHP selections should hit around 1.33 million by the end of Week Two, of which around 1.07 million should be via HealthCare.Gov. I the expect around 1.9 million in Week Three, around 2.4 million by Thanksgiving, and then start ramping up to around 6.3 million by the 12/15 deadline for most states.
Health Insurance Marketplace Open Enrollment Snapshot: Week 2: November 8 – November 14, 2015
The second week of Open Enrollment for Marketplace coverage saw millions more Americans exploring their health insurance options by calling the call center, attending enrollment events, or visiting HealthCare.gov or CuidadoDeSalud.gov.
MNsure, the Minnesota ACA exchange which has gone through a lot of political ping-pong but is still standing, just released their first official 2016 #OE3 enrollment report:
OK, that's 6,864 QHP selections in 17 days, or 404 per day so far.
Minnesota only accounted for 0.5% of total QHP selections for 2015; extrapolated nationally at the same ratio, this would suggest around 1.37 million QHPs nationally through yesterday...which is a little lower than I'm currently estimating, but in the right ballpark.
This really shouldn't be considered profound or prescient, but the entire concept of of "free market competition" only works as intended if the customers actually shop around and compare their options. If people just ignore changes in the offerings available and stick with what they have regardless of the new options available, the "competition = better value" mantra collapses.
That's why I've been stressing the importance of shopping around on the ACA exchanges (or even off-exchange) so much this year. As I noted back in October:
Note: When reading any headline about Rhode Island, always keep in mind that with a total statewide population of just over 1 million, any ACA numbers reported will generally be pretty tiny.
A few days ago, I noted in my entry about Rhode Island's #OE3 Week One enrollments that they had seemingly managed to chalk up a whopping 30,000 people in the first week, nearly as many as their total #OE2 enrollment for 2015. The obvious reason for this, however, is that unlike every other state which is holding off until mid-December to automatically renew current enrollees, Rhode Island has decided to "front-load" the process by doing so up front. In practice, this doesn't really change anything because those current enrollees can still go into their account before 12/23 and switch to a different plan if they wish...or to cancel the renewal altogether if they choose to drop out of any exchange plans next year.
As a result, the 30,680 QHP figure in RI is extremely skewed and can't be used to estimate/project any other state data. It also means, as I said at the time:
