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.
Hmmm...ok, it looks like I'll have to drop my "QHPs selected as a percent of determinations" rule of thumb back a bit. I figured that MA would be up to around 88K by today; instead they're just below 86,000. Still impressive, though...and the 160K Medicaid enrollments are equally so.
In addition, the payment rate is now up to 72% of the total, up from around 65% a couple of weeks ago. Again, remember that many of these 86K are for February start dates, so the payment rate is a bit misleading (for instance, it's possible that 60K out of 67K January enrollees have paid so far (90%) while only 2K out of 19K February enrollees have paid (11%), or something along those lines).
Again, it's also worth noting that in addition to the 86K QHPs selected, there's another 5,511 waiting for checkout and another 76K people who have filled out all their info and been approved for QHP coverage, but who haven't actually selected a policy yet. Some of these may be duplicates or abandoned accounts, of course, but assuming, say, 80% of them eventually do complete the process, that would bring Massachusetts up to a minimum of 151K QHPs by Feb. 15th. If 90% do so, that's a minimum of 159K...and that doesn't include the additional people who start/complete the process over the 40 days remaining in the enrollment period.
My most recent data for PA's "Healthy PA" program (their implementation of the ACA's Medicaid expansion provision) was 118K, so I wasn't going to post on this today, but a subsequent update says that the actual number is higher still, at 134,000:
State officials estimate that as of January 1, 2015 about 600,000 Pennsylvanians became eligible for Medicaid through its newly expanded Healthy Pennsylvaniaoption.
Enrollment began last month, and as of Monday, a spokesperson reported the state had received at least 114,000 household applications (it's unclear how many came from people who were previously uninsured).
.@sangerkatz just got another update - # of household applications for #HealthyPAwent up to 134K (unclear how many previously uninsured).
The Lancet is a weekly peer-reviewed general medical journal. It is among the world's oldest, most prestigious, and best known general medical journals.
The Lancet was founded in 1823 by Thomas Wakley, an English surgeon who named it after the surgical instrument called a lancet, as well as after the architectural term "lancet arch", a window with a sharp pointed arch, to indicate the "light of wisdom" or "to let in light".
The Lancet publishes original research articles, review articles ("seminars" and "reviews"), editorials, book reviews, correspondence, as well as news features and case reports. The Lancet has been owned by Elsevier since 1991. As of 2015, the editor-in-chief is Richard Horton. The journal has editorial offices in London, New York, and Beijing.
LA Times reporter Chris Megerian has posted an important story about California's looming healthcare budget crisis. It mostly deals with the headaches facing the state budget as it tackles major increases in both Medi-Cal (CA's name for Medicaid) and the cost of caring for public employee retirees, and is a good read for healthcare/budget wonks.
What caught my eye, however, was this line about halfway through:
Over the next year, total Medi-Cal enrollment is expected to reach 12.2 million, he said — about one-third of the state's population. It was less than 8 million in 2013.
Hmmm...that sounds a bit high to me, so I ran the numbers against my own current estimates and came up with the following:
Updating Oregon's QHP total does nothing to change the overall tally this year because they're operating on HC.gov now. It is useful to keep a running total on the state, however. In addition, Oregon is the only state (so far) providing hard numbers for off-exchange QHP enrollments.
Members enrolled, Nov. 15-Jan. 4
On Healthcare.gov 81,037
Outside of Healthcare.gov 62,678
Total 143,715
About the data: Enrolled means a person has selected a plan. Consumers must pay the first month's premium for their coverage to become effective. These numbers do not identify whether the first month's premium has been paid. These numbers do not include Oregonians enrolled in the Oregon Health Plan (Medicaid).
