OK, I don't do business endorsements or paid promotions, but this is kind of a special case: 15 years ago today I co-founded my "day job" running Brainwrap Web Design.
By website development standards, that makes me an Old Man in the industry. I ran Brainwrap with an old college friend for the first year; we hit a slow patch and he decided to move on to a more stable corporate position elsewhere, selling his half of the business to me.
I ran the company by myself for another 13 years, until my wife (who had 20+ years of experience in corporate IT programming and management) started working with me. Her assistance was especially helpful during the ACA open enrollment period and my bout with Shingles, during which she took some of our normal site development work off my hands while I scrambled to keep up with the ever-changing enrollment data, so she deserves a lot of the credit for this site as well.
I debated whether I should bundle this point in with the prior Kentucky post, but decided it was worthy of a separate entry.
As I noted there, Kentucky has now enrolled around 335,000 people in Medicaid via the Kynect ACA exchange; an impressive number.
The thing is, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, only about 350,000 Kentuckians who weren't insured prior to January qualified for Medicaid in the first place (including both woodworkers as well as ACA expansion). This means that theoretically up to 96% of all Kentuckians eligible for Medicaid have now been enrolled!
This isn't an official update; it doesn't give an exact number, and there's no QHP/Medicaid breakout, but it's better than nothing:
WASHINGTON – Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear charged Tuesday that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and other critics of the federal health care law are being "disingenuous," attempting to be for a state program that is no different from Obamacare.
The governor called the state health care exchange known as kynect "highly successful," enrolling 421,000 Kentuckians — with 75 percent of them receiving coverage for the first time in their lives.
The final enrollment period breakdown was 82,792 QHPs and 330,615 Medicaid enrollees, or 413,407 total, so this represents an increase since 4/19 of 7,593 total.
If we were still in the open enrollment period, of course, I'd just use the same 20/80 ratio that the existing numbers suggest, but since we're in the "off season" for QHPs this is trickier. I'll assume a 10/90 ratio until I hear otherwise, which would mean that KY's QHP total is now up by 759 and Medicaid is up 6,834.
Michigan is now up to over 57% of the 500,000 residents eligible for Medicaid/CHIP under the Affordable Care Act:
Healthy Michigan Plan Enrollment Statistics
Beneficiaries with Healthy Michigan Plan Coverage: 287,281
(Includes beneficiaries enrolled in health plans and beneficiaries not required to enroll in a health plan.)
*Statistics as of June 9, 2014
*Updated every Monday at 3 p.m.
The good news: Illinois ACA Medicaid expansion is up to 350K, a 20K increase from 2 weeks ago. This represents 44% of the 800K eligible for the expansion program in the state.
The bad news (or good news, depending on your POV): There's nother 250K still in the hopper to be processed. Assuming the same 70% approval rate, that should increase the enrollment number by another 175K.
As of last week, Illinois' backlog of unprocessed Medicaid applications stood at 250,000, up from about 200,000 state officials reported in mid-March, but down from a peak of nearly 500,000 in early April, according to state data.
Since Oct. 1, the start of open enrollment in an expanded Medicaid program authorized by the federal health law, the state has received nearly 900,000 applications for public aid, most of which included Medicaid. Thus far, it has processed about 650,000 of them, granting coverage to about 450,000.
Roughly 350,000 gained Medicaid coverage under the health law, which expanded eligibility to all adults who make less than about $15,500 a year. The remainder gained coverage under old Medicaid parameters, which generally covered children, families and a category of older, sicker patients.
OK, the Medicaid number is a bit squirrelly since it isn't broken out by expansion/woodworkers/churn; the official number as of 4/19 was 27,268, so I'm estimating it at an even 30K.
Otherwise, the QHP total is for paid enrollees, up from 27,221, and the SHOP number is up from 33,614.
Vermont Health Connect has helped 144,500 Vermonters get health coverage. More than half, 80,400, were enrolled in Medicaid, many as a result of the program’s expansion under the Affordable Care Act.
However, the website was launched with significant problems, and eight months later it is still incomplete. State officials said this week that they will continue to rely on the two participating insurance carriers to enroll small businesses throughout the upcoming open enrollment period that begins Nov. 15. There are currently 34,800 people in that group.
There are also 29,300 people in the individual market who purchased commercial insurance. More than half, 62 percent, qualified for subsidies that lower the cost of those plans, though advocates say they are often still difficult to afford.
Minnesota is posting updates almost daily (ironic given that both the federal exchange as well as NY State of Health are officially not posting any updates until November).
In addition to the QHP daily rate (about 24% of what it was during the normal enrollment period), MN's Medicaid total is up another 3,587 in just the past 6 days.
enrollment update
latest enrollment numbers
June 15, 2014
Health Coverage Type Total Enrollments
Medical Assistance 139,214
MinnesotaCare 49,618
Qualified Health Plan (QHP) 51,809
TOTAL 240,641
Since I started the ACA Signups project, I've generally restricted my posts to ACA enrollment-specific articles and data. After all, the subject of healthcare is so huge, and there's so many other far better sources for developments in the medical field, etc, that it seems best to stick to the subject at hand.
However, the anti-vaxxer movement, which started as the punchline to a bad joke named "Jenny McCarthy" has ceased to be amusing and has now become flat-out frightening.
From January 1 to June 10 this year, California already had 3,458 cases of whopping cough, which already exceeds the number of cases reported in 2013, and following a surge in the incidence of the disease in the past two weeks, health official found it necessary to declare an epidemic.
Last week I made a bold estimate that at least 200,000 additional QHP enrollees are likely to be added each month from 4/15 (the end of the first open enrollment period) through 11/15 (the start of the next one). That's 7 months x 200K, or around 1.4 million on top of the 8.02 million confirmed QHP enrollees during the first period (well, technically the last HHS report runs through 4/19).
Nationally, the open enrollment period average was 8.02 million in 201 days (10/1/13 - 4/19/14), or an average of 39,900 QHPs per day (201 days...this includes everything from the disastrous website launches, to the December surge, to the February "lull", to the March insanity straight through to the April "extension period").
Of course, this wouldn't be such a mystery if the HHS Dept. hadn't cut off enrollment reports during the off-season, but I won't go on that rant again.
So where am I getting this 200K estimate during the off season? Well, let's take a look at the numbers we do have since then:
