Until a few days ago, my predictions about how many people would enroll in Qualified Health Plans via the Affordable Care Act exchanges were, without being boastful, dead-on target.
I called the New Year's Eve total with 98.2% accuracy and Medicaid/CHIP determinations through 12/31 with 99.7% accuracy.
I was off by less than 0.02% at the end of January, and by less than 1% through the end of February.
I projected the 3/31 total to be 7.08 million; the final tally was "around" 7.1 million, and my call of 7.78 million as of 4/15 was off by somewhere between 0 - 2.75% (I'll never know for certain because the only official number given (8.02 million) was as of 4 days later).
However, I'm obviously not perfect at this, and if I misjudge a significant factor, my projections will be off accordingly.
Like many other Republican-run states, Texas not only refused to set up their own ACA exchange or expand Medicaid, the state government actively sought out to prevent people from enrolling, actually enacting absurdly strict "regulations" to prevent ACA Navigators from doing their job to help people learn about their rights and how to go through the process:
The navigators must register with the state, undergo a background check and fingerprinting, and complete 20 hours of additional training — beyond the 20 to 30 hours of federal training they've already received.
Hmmm...OK, first it was Hawaii with the QHP total actually going down from 6/28 through 7/05. Then Minnesota reported a huge drop-off in their off-season enrollment rate, from about 52 per day from April through the end of June to just 2 per day for the first 13 days of July.
Now we have Oregon's latest update. While the total QHP figure has grown by 1,092 over the past week, the paid QHP number has only gone up by...10. That's right: Just 10 in the past week, or just over 1 person per day...down from over 300 per day in the off season until now.
(As an aside, new Medicaid enrollments are also slowing down, with just another 290 people being added to the program).
Hmmm...Minnesota's exchange QHPs continue to grow, but the rate has plummetted over the past couple of weeks, dropping from 52 per day through the end of June to just 31 in the past 2 weeks. While I've been expecting the rate to slow down somewhat, this seems like an awfully large drop for such a short period of time.
Combine this with Hawaii, which reported an actual loss of QHPs and I'm starting to wonder if I've misunderstood how the state exchanges are reporting their numbers. It's possible that they're including people who drop their coverage after a few months as well as those who add coverage, which would result in the official tally holding relatively steady over time. I'll have to look into this...
latest enrollment numbers
July 13, 2014
Health Coverage Type Total Enrollments
Medical Assistance 154,106
MinnesotaCare 54,877 Qualified Health Plan (QHP) 52,264
TOTAL 261,247
Yesterday I posted an update from Michigan which touted the state meeting their 1st year Medicaid expansion enrollment target of 322K; today the official tally was updated again, with another 3,000 people being added:
Healthy Michigan Plan Enrollment Statistics
Beneficiaries with Healthy Michigan Plan Coverage: 326,167
(Includes beneficiaries enrolled in health plans and beneficiaries not required to enroll in a health plan.)
*Statistics as of July 14, 2014
*Updated every Monday at 3 p.m.
When we last checked in on Hawaii's ACA exchange on 6/21, the QHP tally stood at 9,586 people, and another 965 SHOP enrollees.
There have been 2 updates from the exchange since then; QHPs went up another 12 over the next week (6/28)...but in the most recent update, the number has dropped down to 9,442...a loss of 156 people:
Connector Updates for July 5, 2014
Total since October 1, 2013
32,959 Applications completed in the Individual Marketplace 9,442 Individuals and families enrolled in the Individual Marketplace
We are teeming with excitement to announce that Nerdist is premiering “Weird Al” Yankovic’s first music video for his #8videos8days project. Feast your eyes on the video for “Tacky,” a wonderfully warped and wacky version of Pharrell’s hyper-bubbly mega-hit, “Happy.”
(Here's the lyrics, since some of them are kind of hard to make out.)
A couple of weeks ago, I posted an entry regarding the proposed rate change requests by the 17 insurance companies participating on Michigan's ACA exchange for 2015. The news at the time was a mixed bag, with some companies requesting rate increases of up to 18%, while others were requesting a reduction of their rates by 22%. Overall, according to the Detroit Free Press article, the average rate increase request is a mere 0.8%. Hooray!
Michigan Governor Rick Snyder doesn't have many things to be proud of, but this is one of them: He did help push the ACA's Medicaid expansion through the extremist GOP-controlled state legislature. In response, the Healthy Michigan program has now enrolled over 323,000 newly-qualified people in Medicaid & CHIP:
LANSING, Mich. – Gov. Rick Snyder today announced that after less than four months, enrollment for the Healthy Michigan Plan already has surpassed its first-year goal of 322,000.
As of today, July 10, Michigan has 323,022 Michigan residents enrolled in the program. The Healthy Michigan Plan extends health care benefits to a half-million low-income residents. Enrollment for the plan began April 1.
The press release mostly crows about reaching the "first year goal" of 322K people in only 14 weeks, but to me the more impressive achievement is hitting 64% of the total eligible population (500K) in that time.
With the unexpected addition of QHP updates from 2 Federal Exchange-based states over the weekend (West Virginia and New Mexico), I've updated the Off-Season QHP Projection spreadsheet again, and now have it sitting at a range of between 9,500 - 12,500 additional exchange-based QHPs per day, or 285K - 375K per month:
I've also made a slight modification as to how I'm distinguishing the upper & lower-bound numbers. Instead of simply dropping Oregon out of the mix, I'm instead using every state with post-4/19 data for the upper bound, and then taking 75% of that for the lower bound. This has the same overall effect but seems more sensible than singling out one particular state for being an outlier.
In any event, this revision suggests that the total 2014 exchange QHP total should end up between 10.0 - 10.6 million. Subtract 10% from that for non-payment and you have somewhere between 9.0 - 9.5 million paid QHPs.
