Humana Group is one of the largest health insurance companies in the country. As such, their enrollment data being made available is extremely helpful in seeing where things stand and how they've changed nationally.
Today, Bob Herman of Modern Healthcare provided me with a link to Humana's latest SEC filing. In addition to a whole mess of financial info which is of little interest to me, there's also all sorts of year-over-year data about their enrollment numbers...including a very handy section about their individual market, broken out by ACA exchange-based, Off Exchange and even their non-ACA compliant enrollments (ie, "grandfathered" and/or "transitional" enrollees).
Unfortunately, the data gets cut off as of 2/28/15, so this doesn't give any insight into the attrition rate since then (or a precise count of how many additional people enrolled during the #ACATaxTime special enrollment period which followed). However, it does give a lot of detailed analysis of the open enrollment period numbers, and does tack on an extra week's worth of private enrollments & 2 week's worth of CH+/Medicaid numbers (the official HHS report only ran through 2/21 for New York and the last press release with CH+/Medicaid numbers was as of 2/15).
As a result, the official numbers are slightly higher than what I had until now across the board:
A team of actuaries at the Minnesota Department of Commerce are currently scrutinizing the proposed rates that have been filed for 2016, and final rates will be announced on October 1. But for now, four MNsure’s individual market carriers have proposed the following rate changes for coverage effective January 1, 2016 (market share is as of the end of the 2015 open enrollment period):
UPDATE 8/27/15: I've been writing up a whole mess of *approved* state rate updates today; look for this entry to be updated on Friday.
Recently, Richard Simpkins (aka icowrich) gave me the idea to take the known state-wide 2016 rate increase requests and go a step further, by plugging the weighted average rate increases for each state into a spreadsheet and then running a weighted average based on each state's proportion of the total U.S. population, like so (scroll to bottom of this entry for links to analysis for each state):
Remember that University of Michigan study I posted about last week which claimed that in spite of all the predictions by ACA opponents that expanding Medicaid would make it impossible for enrollees to actually make a doctor's appointment, the opposite ended up being the case?
A new University of Michigan study shows that the availability of primary care appointments actually improved for people with Medicaid in the first months after the state launched the Healthy Michigan Plan, the state’s Medicaid expansion under the ACA. What’s more, it remained mostly unchanged for those with private insurance.
Well, apparently the Michigan results are not an outlier:
I very rarely write much about Medicare here, partly because I just don't have time to cover every aspect of the healthcare system, partly because Medicare is only impacted by the ACA indirectly for the most part. However, there's been two recent developments which are worth noting:
The slowing growth of healthcare costs has extended Medicare's projected lifespan 13 years beyond projections made in 2009, the last report issued before the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
The Medicare Hospital Insurance Trust Fund will have "sufficient funds to cover its obligations until 2030," the Medicare Board of Trustees said Wednesday in its annual financial review of the $613 billion program.
Over 71.6 million individuals were enrolled in Medicaid and CHIP in May 2015. This enrollment count is point-in-time (on the last day of the month) and includes all enrollees in the Medicaid and CHIP programs who are receiving a comprehensive benefit package.
509,082 additional people were enrolled in May 2015 as compared to April 2015 in the 51 states that reported comparable May and April 2015 data.
Looking at the additional enrollment since October 2013 when the initial Marketplace open enrollment period began, among the 49 states reporting both May 2015 enrollment data and data from July-September of 2013, more than 12.8 million additional individuals are enrolled in Medicaid and CHIP as of May 2015, more than a 22 percent increase over the average monthly enrollment for July through September of 2013. (Connecticut and Maine are not included in this count.)
Most Mainers buying Affordable Care Act insurance will see modest increases in their premiums for 2016, below the national average and much lower than the double-digit increases projected in some cities by a recent study of initial rate filings.
About 80 percent of the 75,000 Mainers purchasing ACA marketplace insurance have a plan through Lewiston-based Community Health Options – formerly Maine Community Health Options. The ACA marketplace, operated on the Web as healthcare.gov, is where those without insurance – often part-time or self-employed workers – can obtain subsidized benefits.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Media Line: (916) 206-7777 July 27, 2015
COVERED CALIFORNIA HOLDS RATE INCREASES DOWN FOR SECOND CONSECUTIVE YEAR
Average Increase Is 4 Percent; Consumers Who Shop Can Lower Their Premium by an Average of 4.5 Percent
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Covered California announced its rates for 2016 and unveiled which health insurance companies will be offering plans through the marketplace. The statewide weighted average increase will be 4 percent, which is lower than last year’s increase of 4.2 percent and represents a dramatic change from the trends that individuals faced in the years before the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
