This morning I introduced an all-new, cleaned-up version of The Graph which only includes commercial policy enrollments via the ACA (exchange QHPs, plus references to off-exchange QHPs, ACA-enabled ESIs and sub26er enrollees), projected out through Nov. 15th (when the whole process starts all over again).
Now I've added the other half of the revamped graph: ACA-enabled Medicaid/CHIP enrollments. Like the QHP graph, there are 3 color-coded sections, but in this case they represent "Strict ACA Expansion" (people who are only eligible for Medicaid/CHIP due to the income provisions within the law in half the states); "Bulk Transfers" (ie, transferred from existing state-run programs such as LIHP in California, Commonwealth Care in Massachusetts, etc. due to ACA provisions) and "Woodworkers" (people who were already eligible for Medicaid prior to the expansion provisions, but who never enrolled before due to either being unaware of their eligibility, not understanding the process, etc). "Woodworkers" are folks who have been "drawn out of the woodwork" since last October thanks to a robust outreach program by the government and affiliated nonprofits, as well as a streamlined enrollment process and other measures.
QHPs are up another 183, Medicaid 5,242 and MinnesotaCare (which is a little bit like high-end Medicaid, from what I can tell) is up another 1,160 over the past 7 days:
latest enrollment numbers
September 28, 2014
Health Coverage Type Cumulative Enrollments
Medical Assistance 212,331
MinnesotaCare 74,609
Qualified Health Plan (QHP) 55,001
TOTAL 341,941
OK, I'll be frank, this has little to do with the Affordable Care Act itself. Michigan's state legislature has already (grudgingly) passed the ACA's Medicaid expansion program (we call it "Healthy Michigan" here, and it's been very successful).
In other words, the only directly ACA-related items likely to come up over the next couple of years are presumably a) continuing support for Medicaid expansion (not sure if it has to be renewed annually or what) and b) the outside possibility of voting on establishing our own ACA health insurance exchange in the event that the Halbig/King cases end up being upheld by the SCOTUS.
Having said that, if you support me and the work I'm doing here, I'd like to ask a personal favor of you: Please help out the woman running for representative in Michigan's 40th state house district, Mary Belden.
Louise Norris of HealthInsurance.org has posted a couple of fantastic articles the past week or so. First up is an explanation of why most current healthcare policies weren't cancelled...which is to say, the insurance companies cancelled most of them for different reasons than what ACA critics are claiming:
But AV is just one of numerous factors involved in compliance with the ACA. There were many other reasons that existing plans were not compatible with the law. Of particular importance, less than 2 percent of the individual health plans in existence in early 2013 provided coverage for all ten of the ACA’s mandatory essential health benefits.
...So when policies are being cancelled and replaced with ACA-compliant coverage, AV isn’t likely to be the primary culprit. Virtually no individual policies that were in effect prior to 2014 are compliant with the ACA, for a host of reasons other than AV.
Hmmm...now this is interesting. Yesterday it was brought to my attention via Twitter that the Covered California website (or at least the actual off-season enrollment portion of it) had been offline for "2+ weeks". Sure enough, when I took a look for myself, after clicking past the home page, the enrollment section had a message saying that it was offline for maintenance but that I should "check back on September 15th". Of course, seeing how it was Sept. 28th when I read this, that suggests that the maintenance started sometime before the 15th and continued well past the estimated completion date.
@CoveredCA website has been down for 2+ weeks. What are people supposed to do? At least update your home page. #ACASignups#CoveredCA
As we approach the 2nd Open Enrollment period, and as The Graph has become far too unwieldy to keep laid out in its current format, I've decided to break out the commercial plans (Exchange-based QHPs, plus references to the off-exchange QHPs, ESIs via SHOP exchanges/etc. and "sub26ers") onto their own graph. As you can see, this allows me to add another important new feature: My projection of the currently enrolled/paid up figure at any given time. We're also close enough to Year Two now (and my projections to date have proven accurate enough so far) that I'm comfortable projecting the QHP graph forward through November 15th (at which point Year Two starts up).
The 11/15 projections (as well as the "currently enrolled" line) assume a 9,000 new enrollments per day, a 90% payment rate, and a 2% average monthly attrition rate. This lines up almost precisely with the recent CMS announcement that 7.3 million people were currently enrolled & paying as of August 15th.
OK, I feel a bit silly posting this several days after HHS Sec. Burwell stated it officially, and it may seem especially anticlimactic given that I had already posted similar numbers from not one, not two, not three, not four, but five different respected national health insurance coverage surveys a couple of months ago (RAND Corp, Gallup, Urban Institute, Commonwealth Fund and the New England Journal of Medicine, to be precise), but it still seems like a good idea to lock this down for the record:
Taking questions yesterday from reporters for the first time at a White House news conference, HHS Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell said insurance programs created by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act have reduced the nation’s uninsured population by 26 percent. She called the reduction “the most important number” to measure the law’s success.
OK, the number-crunching gets a little complicated here, and isn't helped by some sloppy wording on the part of the reporter (though it's a highly useful article overall).
Health exchange managers expect to lose about 30 percent of enrollees due to attrition by year’s end.
That means they’ll carry over about 114,000 existing customers as they head into the 2015 open enrollment season.
Connect for Health Colorado managers expect enrollments to slide back from a total of 146,000 so far.
...Of the 146,000 people who signed up by the end of August, exchange managers said 10 percent dropped out right away, never paying their first month’s premium. Then about 20 percent more leave in subsequent months.
The new GAO study shows that, instead, taxpayers are subsidizing abortions. Customers in five states have no abortion-free plans available to them, and in many states, customers can't tell which plans cover abortion and which don't.
...Fifteen issuers and the Washington Health Benefit Exchange ... did not itemize the premium amount associated with non-excepted abortion services coverage on enrollees’ bills nor indicate that they send a separate bill for that premium amount.
One of last week's big ACA stories was the news that the largest insurance company on Minnesota's exchange, PreferredOne, was dropping out of MNsure.
ACA critics pounced all over this news as Yet More Proof That Obamacare Is Failing®, even though pretty much every "proof" they've presented to date has turned out to be nonsense or, at best, vastly exaggerated (never mind, either, the fact that overall, 77 new insurers are joining the ACA exchanges while only 15 are dropping out, for a net gain of 62 companies nationally).
OK, I'll be frank, this has little to do with the Affordable Care Act itself. Michigan's state legislature has already (grudgingly) passed the ACA's Medicaid expansion program (we call it "Healthy Michigan" here, and it's been very successful).
