A lot of people have asked me if I plan on doing a 4/15 QHP projection. Honestly, I'm a little burnt out at the moment and need some chill time on the prognosticating thing. However, if this news is any guide, it could be huge:
Now topping more than 3 million, the number of Californians who have enrolled in a private health care plan or in Medi-Cal through the state's health insurance exchange will likely rise by about 500,000 people who started but did not finish their applications by Monday's midnight deadline, exchange officials said Thursday.
At a news conference, Peter Lee, executive director of the Covered California exchange, told reporters that of the half-million individuals who had started their applications in the last week of March, at least 20,000 had finished their applications by Tuesday.
Now, I'm assuming that "finished their applications" in this case actually means "enrolled", because 500K / 15 days = 33,333 per day if they plan on squeezing that many in under the new 4/15 wire.
Now that we're past the official Open Enrollment period, I've overhauled The Graph with some major changes & updates. These include:
By popular request and much pondering(see comments at bottom of link), I am no longer subtracting the 3.7M Cancelled Policies from the grand total. However, these are still clearly and prominently noted in the yellow box.
As promised, I have lowered the "Sub-26er" bottom-end estimate again, from a low of 2.2M to 1.6M. I'm done mucking around with this until further notice.
With the official announcement of a whopping 1.7M OFF-exchange QHP enrollments from the BCBS Association, I have increased the documented off-exchange total to 2.17M on the graph, causing a noticable spike at the end (obviously these weren't all enrolled in today, but I can't really back-date these so they're all added at once).
Note that I've also deleted all of the state-specific BCBS off-exchange QHPs since the 1.7M total noted above supercedes all of them.
Since the 9M total off-exchange figure credited to the Rand Survey was a very rough estimate(see update at bottom of link), I've added an "up to" caveat (and the 6.83M balance isn't on the graph itself anyway).
I've replaced the 7M arrow with 6M and 7M lines to reduce the clutter.
Finally, the most controversial change is probably the removal of the "documented unpaid" exchange QHPs (as well as the "estimated additional" QHPs; instead, I've simplified things greatly by separating the total Exchange QHP number into 2 areas: 93% estimated PAID (or will pay soon) and 7% UNPAID (or may not pay).
I'll be happy to revise this 93 / 7 ratio one way or the other as more data comes in, but for now, based on all the partial "Paid/Unpaid" data I've seen to date, that seems to be fairly accurate.
About 5 different people have sent me a link to this new study by the Urban Institute, which concludes that the total number of uninsured adults in the U.S. has been reduced by around 5. million people since last fall.
They're pretty clear about the time period: it runs from just before the exchanges launched until...well, actually, until early March (more on this below):
The Urban Institute's Health Reform Monitoring Survey (HRMS) has been tracking insurance coverage since the first quarter of 2013. Today, we report the first estimate of how the uninsurance rate has changed through early March 2014. These results track changes through most of the first Affordable Care Act's (ACA) open-enrollment period, which ended on March 31, 2014.
The results? According to this study, it's a net reduction of 5.4M uninsured:
As deaconblues reminds me, the 29K is in addition to the 720 subsidized enrollees that they've managed to get through their messed-up system.
Massachusetts will not meet its goal of moving more than 200,000 people into insurance plans that comply with the federal law by the end of June. It has managed to enroll about 29,000 residents in unsubsidized coverage, 138,000 in temporary coverage, and another 114,000 in extended coverage since the October launch of its new website, with a significant number applying on paper, said a Connector spokesman Thursday.
Presented without comment (and again, I'm NOT endorsing eHealth, but they're obviously going to come up in conversation a lot since they're essentially a private version of HC.gov without the subsidy factor):
First, don’t believe polemicists who argue that 70% or more of buying policies at HealthCare.gov had insurance already, as Republicans claim, in an interpretation of a McKinsey & Co. study that Politifact ruled “false.” Even at eHealth, which has almost no subsidy-eligible customers so far, 51% of clients this year were previously uninsured, up from 34% in late 2013, Lauer said.
With 83% of the people using HealthCare.gov and the state exchanges eligible for subsidies, it’s highly unlikely that they’re going to skew more heavily toward the being previously-insured than eHealth’s crowd.
Oregon appears to be purging their old unpaid enrollments, for cleaner totals (along with the dental enrollments, which even I haven't really talked about)...I'm assuming this is through yesterday. Note that the Medicaid number doesn't include an additional 128K enrolled via their "Fast Track" program from earlier:
April 3, 2014 Update: Private coverage and Oregon Health Plan enrollment through Cover Oregon
Medical enrollments through Cover Oregon: 200,165
Total private medical insurance enrollments through Cover Oregon 1: 58,833
Oregon Health Plan enrollments through Cover Oregon: 141,332
Total private dental insurance enrollments through CoverOregon 1: 12,066
Net enrollments
Net private medical: 55,833
Net private dental: 11,208
Background: With three months of open enrollment completed, Cover Oregon is expanding the enrollment report beyond what is required by the federal Center for Consumer Information & Insurance Oversight to include net private insurance enrollments and also dental enrollments.
OK, this is why CoveredCA was holding off on announcing their numbers: Peter Lee had to testify before Congress today anyway:
Enrollment in Covered California private health insurance plans hit 1,221,727 through March 31. In fact, March was the highest single month of enrollment, with more than 416,000 people signing up for a health insurance plan.
...Medi-Cal enrolled approximately 1.9 million people through the end of March, including 1.1 million through the Covered California portal and county offices, approximately 650,000 former Low Income Health Program (LIHP) members who were transitioned to Medi-Cal by the California Department of Health Care Services (DHCS) and 180,000 individuals who applied through the state’s Express Lane program.
And there we have it: Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post reports that BCBSA (the family of Blue Cross companies, as well as Anthem, Regeant, etc) confirms 1.7 millionACA-compliant QHPs sold OFF-exchangenationally from October 1st through March 1st (that's right, the rest of March isn't included; for comparison, March made up 40%of the exchange QHP total for the open enrollment period):
Newsy: BlueCrossBlueShield companies sold 1.7 million ACA-compliant policies OFF-exchange between 10/1-3/1. #obamacare
Since I'm shifting the "Paid/Unpaid" tally to a simplified "93% Paid or Will Pay Within a Reasonable Time" model, I'm no longer distinguishing the paid/unpaid factor for states which do so (although I am still listing them when released by the states):
Enrollment data (Oct. 1, 2013 through March 31, 2014)
Total HealthSource RI enrollments (including those who have not yet paid): 27,961
Paid enrollments: 21,097
Medicaid enrollments (per EOHHS): 64,590
Small employer applications initiated: 1,319
Small employer enrollment: 175 (based on their submitted census, these employers represent 700 covered employees and 1,110 covered lives)
Small employers who enrolled in Full Employee Choice: 103
