On the campaign trail, Bill Walker made expanding the state’s Medicaid program under the Affordable Care Act one of his top priorities. He said he could make the decision without input from the state legislature:
“It’s up to the Governor to accept that.”
But when Walker takes office next month, will it really be so easy to expand a program that has been a tough sell in other conservative states?
Medicaid expansion would allow around 40,000 low income Alaskans– mostly childless adults, to receive health benefits. The federal government will pay 100 percent of the program until the end of 2016. After that, the state’s share will slowly increase to 10 percent by 2020. Walker has said the decision is a no-brainer, at least while the federal government is providing full funding.
Massachusetts continues to kick butt this time around in general, but I particularly like that they're providing a daily breakout of their enrollment data. Check today's out, which includes both Wednesday and Thanksgiving Thursday:
This story from the 27th isn't an official number, but it's consistant with the formal press release from a few days earlier which had CO's tally at 6,144 as of 11/22:
Enrollment in Connect for Health Colorado, a health-insurance exchange, opened Nov. 15, and more than 8,000 people are already enrolled. Only about 200 people had enrolled during the same period last year, according to a release from Connect for Health Colorado.
...Many residents re-enrolled this month, he said, and there are a “significant” number of new enrollees.
On November 24th I took a shot at estimating how many 2015 QHP (qualified health plans) had been enrolled in as of the first week of the new open enrollment period. Based on the extremely limited data I had available from a handful of state exchanges, I internally estimated it was probably close to 500,000 nationally...but in the interest of caution, publicly went with 410,000.
Since around 75% of the total enrollments are likely to come from the federal exchange (Oregon and Nevada have been added to it, adding 109,000 current enrollees, while Idaho has moved off onto their own exchange with only 76,000 currently enrolled), a simple extrapolation suggests that the *total* number as of 11/21 was actually more like 610,000.
As I keep hammering over and over, asking "How many have PAID??" is a perfectly reasonable question to ask...as long as you a) wait until after the payments in question are actually due and b) you make sure to be as comprehensive as possible, since payment rates can vary from state to state or even insurer to insurer.
If you don't, you end up with a big ol' pile of crap like the infamous GOP House Energy & Commerce Committee "report" from back in April which tried to claim only a 67% first month payment rate when the actual rate ended up being around 88%.
The good news: Enrollment in the ACA private Medicaid option program is up to 218K, about 7,000 higher than it was as of mid-October.The bad news: With the state legislature & governor's office being completely overrun by Republicans, the future of the program isn't looking great:
This may seem a bit anticlimactic after this morning's Healthcare.Gov news, but it actually just serves to underscore how great the 2015 open enrollment period is doing so far:
Again, assuming roughly 50% of all QHP determinations are already resulting in plan selections the same day (which was consistent for at least the first 8 days), this means that total QHP selections should be roughly: 16,186 + 3,770 + 15,562 = 35,518 x 0.5 = 17,759. Lop off a couple hundred to err on the side of caution and Massachusetts should have roughly 17,500 or more QHPs selected already.
Once again: In 2014 they only hit 32K total in 6.5 months.
Meanwhile, ACA Medicaid can claim credit for nearly 31,000 more people being added to the tally.
