Colorado becomes the 14th state with at least partial enrollment data, and as with every other state so far, the opening numbers are very, very good:
State health insurance exchange officials on Monday said 6,144 people have signed up in the first eight days of open enrollment for 2015, well ahead of last year's pace of 204.
The 6,144 sign-ups were predominantly renewals — 4,400 people re-enrolling though Connect for Health Colorado, according to its interim chief executive, Gary Drews.
...Among this year's enrollees, Drews said, 3,400 are receiving financial assistance.
The 936 people who have signed up for dental insurance since Nov. 15 compares favorably with the 87 dental plan enrollments for this period in 2013.
Also glad to see CO breaking out the renewal/new numbers; it'd be a nice touch if every state did so.
This is awesome. Remember how last week I was assuming that roughly 50% of those determined eligible for QHP enrollments likely had already gone ahead and done so each day? At the end of the week I pulled back from this and went with a more cautious 1/3.
Well, it turns out I had it right in the first place: Massachusetts is about to announce 14,101 QHPs actually selected as of Saturday, out of 28,175 determinations (essentially 50% on the nose)!
In addition, they're already up to 23,792 MassHealth (Medicaid) enrollments, which is also excellent.
(link provided soon...it's not even on their website yet!)
For context, Massachusetts is enrolling people in private policies eleven times faster than they did last year...and that includes the December & late March surges.
Put another way, in just 8 days MA has already enrolled about 44% as many people as they did in 200 days last time around.
Crud. The bulk of this article is about how Jonathan "Diarrhea of the Mouth" Gruber was partly behind Colorado's ACA enrollment projections. However, there's one paragraph deep into it which gives me a sad for an entirely unrelated reason:
Connect for Health no longer tracks the Medicaid sign-up numbers, communications director Luke Clarke said. And officials have said also that they do not have a firm indication how many people getting insurance through the exchange used to be uninsured, though the non-profit marketplace was designed to be a primary vehicle for insuring the uninsured.
(sigh) Here I am doing everything I can to improve the transparancy...ah, well...
Recently there was a nonsense survey published by Bankrate which tried to claim that half of the 6.7 million current ACA exchange enrollees have no intention of sticking with the exchanges. What made this particular survey particularly stupid was that it included anyone who had visited one of the exchange websites, not just those who actually, you know, enrolled in a policy through one.
A couple of days ago, a new poll from Morning Consult, which actually surveyed those who are enrolled through the ACA exchanges came up with much more sensible results:
A majority of voters who purchased insurance from an exchange intend to keep their plan for 2015, according to a new poll.
Morning Consult polling found that compared with three months ago, more respondents say they will keep their insurance plans next year. Fifty-two percent of registered voters say they’ll continue with their coverage, compared with 44 percent in September polling.
I posted Connecticut's first week QHP & Medicaid numbers a few days ago. However, thanks to Dan Mangan providing a direct link to the press release itself, I can now add one other data point: SHOP (Small Business) exchange enrollments already have over 1,000 enrolled employees in just the first week of the 2nd Open Enrollment period (1,003 to be precise)!
To get a sense of how dramatic this is, consider that as of July, Access Health CT had only 602 total covered lives in SHOP plans. The distinction between employees and total lives is important, since the latter assumes perhaps 2-3 individuals covered for each employee enrolled.
In other words, 1,003 employees covered likely means perhaps 1,500 - 2,000 actual people covered by those policies...which means that in just one week, Connecticut may already have tripled the total people enrolled in SHOP plans for the full 2014 period.
I've been thinking about this a lot over the weekend. My prior estimate of QHP enrollments through the first week of the 2015 Open Enrollment period (enrollments being defined as "number of covered lives via plans selected, whether the first premium has been paid yet or not") stood at 212,000 "or more". I included the "or more" because some of the state data was not only partial, but only covered a single insurance company within that state. In addition, in some cases the data I have only covers renewals or new enrollments as opposed to both.
So, it's been 3 days since the Great #DentalGate story broke (yes, I'm abandoning my efforts to make #ObamaDentata the Officially Accepted Stupid Media Label for this incident...no one else seems to be running with it, so it seems that slapping "-Gate" onto every scandal/alleged scandal in politics is inescapable these days).
When Alex Wayne of Bloomberg News asked for my response before he broke the story publicly, I said that, assuming the story was accurate, I was "appalled". I stand by that response, because I am appalled regardless of whether it was done deliberately or by mistake.
Unfortunately, there aren't any specific enrollment numbers given out in this article, but the 3rd paragraph includes a hell of an eye-opener...especially given that this is in deep-red South Carolina:
Last year, insurance agents and federally funded navigators were sitting around their computers, hoping to get into the balky website in the first few weeks after it went online on Oct. 1. When they were able to log in, the system moved at a snail’s pace. The rollout was viewed as a disaster for the Obama administration and the early implementation of the insurance mandate in the Affordable Care Act.
This year, the problem has been finding enough time to help the early rush of people who want to either shop for the best policy or go ahead and enroll. At Richland Library, the appointments for enrollment help are booked through the end of November.
OK, not an exact number, but this story ran on 11/20, the 6th day of 2015 open enrollment, so...
Nevada Health Co-op, based in Las Vegas, was created to offer affordable health insurance, and to compete with other companies offering insurance in our state. Since open enrollment began Saturday, the Nevada Health Co-op has been very busy.
Director of Business Development Patti McCoy says they have been enrolling about 100 people a day.
Again, like my initial entries for Illinois and Oregon, this is only for a single insurer out of several operating in the state, so the actual QHP enrollment number is likely considerably higher.
Like the Illinois item, this is only a very partial number because it only relates to the first 2 days for a single insurance provider, but it's better than nothing:
Dr. Ralph Prows, CEO of Oregon's Health CO-OP, said his plan tallied about 500 enrollments during the opening weekend and has not experienced any problems with the back-end process for receiving enrollment data from the exchange.
Oregon and Nevada's data numbers should be interesting to watch since they both dumped their own exchange sites in favor of the federal one at HC.gov, of course...
