An hour or so ago, the Republican Staff of the Committee on Energy & Commerce Republican, chaired by Republican Representative Fred Upton, issued a press release which claims that:
April 15, 2014, only 67 percent of individuals and families that had selected a health plan in the federally facilitated marketplace had paid their first month’s premium and therefore completed the enrollment process.
OK, let's unpeel this onion slowly, shall we?
First of all, the press release makes it very clear that the enrollment data which they're talking about includes all enrollments on the Federal exchange through April 15. Note the following wording (emphasis mine):
Rhode Island's ACA Medicaid expansion was at around 65K a couple of weeks ago, so this is a nice small bump:
Through April 19, 70,243 people had signed up for Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act rollout, according to state figures, with federal dollars paying for about two-thirds of those people and state and federal dollars roughly splitting the cost for the other third, because they were already eligible before Obamacare entered the picture.
My Medicaid spreadsheet currently estimates Illinois at roughly 200K "strict expansion" and another 115K "woodworkers". This article suggests that the woodworker number may be too high, but the "strict expansion" number may be dramatically low:
For the first time, low-income adults without children are eligible for government health coverage.
In Illinois, officials expect that'll mean 350,000 new people in Medicaid. And that's not all.
Julie Hamos, director of the Department of Health Care and Family Services, says the news reports and advertising and community outreach around the Obamacare deadline led to a separate spike.
"We have 80,000 more than the usual enrollment of people who already were eligible, they just didn't sign up. But because of that activity in the communities, now they're signing up."
The first article is mainly a breakdown of off-exchange QHP enrollments across various Blue Cross companies; normally this would be something of a jackpot for me, but since the BCBSA had already stated that they had over 1.7 million off-exchange enrollments not including March or April, these numbers don't really help out much. What I really need at this point are state-by-state off-exchange QHP numbers (ideally through at least the end of March), and I don't see those coming anytime soon.
HOWEVER, the article does also give an updated overview of where the "But how many have PAID???" situation stands...or at least, where it stood as of February 1st:
According to the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, between 80% and 85% of people who signed up for a Blues plan through a public exchange are paying their premiums. The percentage is based on a survey of member Blues plans as of Feb. 1. But individual Blues plans say that number is higher.
Hawaii's original CMS target was a piddly 9,000 exchange QHPs...believe it or not, they may just barely squeak over that line after all (although my own target for HI was 11,000, which they're almost certainly not gonna pull off...)
Total through April 26, 2014:
31,310 Applications completed in the Individual Marketplace 8,742 Individuals and families enrolled in the Individual Marketplace
576 Employers applied to SHOP Marketplace 628 Employees and dependents enrolled via SHOP Marketplace
Yes, yes, I know...the "official" open enrollment period "ended" on March 31st, and the "official" extension period ended on April 15th. However, there were a few exceptions to even that, including:
The 36 states run by HC.gov: If you submitted a paper application by 4/07, you have until today to complete your enrollment
Hawaii, DC and Oregon pushed out their official extension date until today
Other states such as CA, CO, CT, KY, MD, MA, MN, NY, RI, VT and WA have already shut down open enrollment, either on 3/31, 4/15 or 4/22
To my knowledge, after midnight tonight, that leaves only three states with any sort of options left:
Nevada has bumped their "started by 3/31" enrollment extension out until May 30.
Colorado is allowing people up until May 31st to complete their enrollments, but only if they applied for Medicaid but had their eligibility denied.
Massachusetts still has something like 270,000 people stuck in "Limbo Status" who may (?) have until June 30th to have their situations sorted out...not exactly sure what's going on with that, however.
Aside from that, the following exceptions hold true for every state:
Recently, I've been puzzling over a question: what is all this "deadline creep" really telling us? Not just about the considerable burden it's placed on Charles Gaba in continuing this website, which is obviously no joke—but also about what's happening as the ACA rolls out. We've been watching deadline creep for at least a month now. And I think it's kind of a big deal.
