Check out what just showed up in my in box this afternoon:
HHS Blog: Medicaid Enrollment Shows Continued Growth in April
Medicaid Enrollment Shows Continued Growth in April
By Cindy Mann, Deputy Administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and Director of the Centers for Medicaid and CHIP Services
Medicaid enrollment continues to increase all across the country, especially in those states that have expanded their Medicaid programs under the Affordable Care Act.
As of the end of April, 6 million more individuals were enrolled in Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) as compared to the period before the initial open enrollment under the Affordable Care Act started. That includes 1.1 million additional people enrolled in April as compared to March in the 48 states that reported data for both April and March.
Finally, we have Nevada; while their QHP enrollment was pretty lame, their Medicaid expansion has done quite well. They have an estimated 304,000 people eligible for expansion, of which the state has already enrolled about 27%:
There were 467,000 Medicaid enrollees as of the end of April — 50,000 more than anticipated, said Mike Willden, director of the state Department of Health and Human Services. Of those 83,000 people are newly eligible childless adults who did not previously qualify.
Willden projected Nevada's Medicaid numbers will reach 600,000 by the end of the year.
An estimated 220,000 New Mexicans are eligible for expanded Medicaid benefits, and 121,000 of them signed up for the newly available coverage. Many of them found their way to Medicaid by visiting the insurance exchanges online, by talking with guides, or at enrollment events designed to encourage use of the exchange.
Lots of Medicaid expansion updates today; here's Illinois...
Statewide, about 330,000 have enrolled in the expanded Medicaid program through the end of May, blowing away initial state estimates of about 200,000 for all of 2014, Koetting said.
The total eligible for ACA expansion in Illinois is around 801,000, so they've hit around 41% of that already.
OK, looks like expansion Medicaid enrollments are starting to slow down here in Michigan; only about 8,000 more people signed up over the past week. Still, that's 55% of the half a million total Michiganders estimated to be eligible for the expanded program:
Healthy Michigan Plan Enrollment Statistics
Beneficiaries with Healthy Michigan Plan Coverage: 276,662
(Includes beneficiaries enrolled in health plans and beneficiaries not required to enroll in a health plan.)
*Statistics as of June 2, 2014
*Updated every Monday at 3 p.m.
Rand Paul has a habit of being just as much of a weasel as his senior counterpart Mitch McConnell on most issues, but occasionally being "refreshingly" honest. Case in point:
FRANKFORT — Saying he favors a full repeal of "Obamacare" but citing a "technical question," U.S. Sen. Rand Paul on Friday gave cover to U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell a week after McConnell said Kynect and the federal law are not connected.
..."There's a lot of questions that are big questions that are beyond just the exchange and the Kynect and things like that," Paul said.
"It's ... how we're going to fund these things."
...When asked a second time if he would want to dismantle Kynect, Paul said: "I would repeal all of Obamacare."
OK, contributor deaconblues sent me a link yesterday which gave updates as of 5/27...but when I checked the link this morning, it was dated 5/28 and the numbers were all slightly higher!
If I'm reading this correctly, Minnesota seems to have decided to start posting daily updates now, which is ironic given that HHS has stopped issuing updates completely!
Frankly, for my purposes, the only way that this could be any handier would be if they included a hard "paid" count with each update, but they've repeatedly made it clear that they average around 95% so that's not a problem:
enrollment update
latest enrollment numbers
May 28, 2014
Health Coverage Type Total Enrollments
Medical Assistance 129,332
MinnesotaCare 47,328
Qualified Health Plan (QHP) 50,881
TOTAL 227,541
Regular readers of this site know that the ACA Signups project started over at Daily Kos. This is the first time I can recall using dKos as a primary source for a story link. I'm sorry to say it's not exactly a flattering one as far as Maryland's ill-fated state exchange is concerned:
Maryland's health exchange website, which is best known for falling to pieces on Oct. 1, will be scrapped after $129 million in spending. In April, the Maryland Health Exchange board voted to adopt Connecticut's web application.
At the time officials refused to say they were junking the Noridian-designed system. It was a just revamping ... right.
However, the state can't transfer data from one system to the other.
The fix? Contact 275,000 Medicaid enrollees -- about 75% of the people on the exchange -- and have them log onto a new system and put their information in again.
A rather depressing end to Nevada's first open enrollment period. The state pushed their extension period far beyond any other state (most states stopped at 4/15; Oregon's was 4/30...Nevada kicked it out another month beyond that to 5/30), and still didn't come close to either their initial target or even my own "fair share" target of 73,000 QHP enrollees:
About 35,700 consumers have purchased insurance coverage through the program. Enrollment is far less than an initial target of 118,000.
(and yes, that 35,700 figure is paid, not total; the total number stood at 47,245 a couple of weeks ago).
