This doesn't change the actual total number of Rhode Island's Medicaid expansion numbers, but it does specify the ratio between "strict expansion" and the "woodworker" enrollees...66% to 34%. Interestingly, this is virtually identical to the Washington State ratio (again, 67% to 33%).
This isn't enough to apply to the other expansion states yet, but if it does prove to be the case, that should be helpful in figuring out how accurate my current estimates are. I currently have "strict expansion" at roughly 3.7 million, while "woodworkers" are at 2.05 million. A strict 67/33 ratio would have the "woodworker" number at around 1.82 million...except that the non-expansion states also have some woodworkers as well, which should account for the additional 230K or so.
Figures obtained from the Chafee administration by WPRI.com show that out of the 64,590 Rhode Islanders who signed up for Medicaid from October through March using the state’s new HealthSource RI marketplace, 34% were eligible before the new law expanded the rules for who could sign up.
A few days ago, Michigan's newly-expanded Medicaid tally sat at around 32,000, plus another 54,000 people transferred into the program from an existing state-run one, for a total of about 86,000 people.
Today that number has grown to over 109K:
Healthy Michigan Plan Enrollment Statistics
• Updated every Tuesday at 3 p.m.
Total Healthy Michigan Plan Beneficiaries (including ABW transition prior to April 1): 109,228
Total Enrollment in Healthy Michigan Plan after April 1: 72,921
No breakout between Private QHPs & Medicaid/CHIP yet, but NY State of Health just issued this press release:
ALBANY, NY (April 15, 2014) – NY State of Health (NYSOH), the State’s official health plan marketplace, reported that as of 9 a.m. today, 1,311,271 New Yorkers have completed their applications and 949,428 have enrolled for coverage since the launch of the Marketplace on October 1, 2013. More than 70 percent of those who have enrolled to date were uninsured at the time of application. The Marketplace is well on its way to meeting or exceeding its enrollment goal of 1.1 million people by the end of 2016.
This figure is about 16,200 higher than just 4 days ago, meaning NY is averaging around 4K/day. Assuming no final day spike (or drop-off), their final total should come in at around 954,000 people.
Not gonna update the spreadsheet or graph until I get the actual QHP/Medicaid breakout, however, since those are almost always provided within a few hours of the combined number in NY.
I've been shouting from the rooftops about OFF-exchange QHPs for months now (I first added a column for them on January 3rdand had my first significant data update on January 31st), and until recently few in the news media seemed to catch on to the significance of these.
Until a few weeks ago, I had only officially documented about 560,000 off-exchange QHPs, but guestimated that there were easily 4 million or more out there (I had mused off-handedly back in mid-February that the total could potentially be 7.7 million, but decided to backtrack to "4M or more" out of caution).
Nothing major, just another 4,000 people added to NM's Medicaid tally:
An estimated 107,000 New Mexicans have enrolled in Medicaid since the state expanded the qualifications in October to include low-income adults, state Human Services Department spokesman Matt Kennicott said Monday.
...A total of 26,412 New Mexicans had enrolled in health plans through the state insurance exchange by the March 31 enrollment deadline, the state office of the Superintendent of Insurance said in a news release issued recently.
...An additional 10,000 applications had been submitted by the deadline but remained unprocessed, the statement said.
I've been debating whether to post about this since frankly, I'm not entirely sure that I have all the details straight about how this works. If anyone more familiar with this process wants to correct or clarify my description in the comments, please feel free to do so.
OK, so there's all sorts of hand wringing over how much premium rates will increase for 2015 based on the 2014 risk pool. The CBO issued a report yesterday which projects that in spite of all the fretting, the overall average increase will only be a few percent, which is good news if true (although this will no doubt vary from state to state).
However, I recently learned a couple of very interesting things about how the ACA works when it comes to pricing oversight and the "risk corridor" program.
Think Progress has a nice explanation of "risk corridors" (which the GOP hypocritically and wrongly refers to as an "insurance company bailout"):
There are many ways of getting a society to “do the right thing”. Many years ago, as I was driving into San Francisco across the Bay Bridge, traffic was at a crawl – except for two lanes labeled Car Pool. Those cars whizzed by and their drivers didn’t even have to stop to pay the road toll. Life can be so unfair to a lonely guy in a BMW or Porsche.
Above the highway was a billboard advertising, in large letters, the Car Pool Switchboard; its sole function was to hook up people regularly commuting from one place to another at roughly the same time. Saving a few dimes by sharing gas expenses, or even being forgiven a couple of bucks in road toll, may not have seemed like much of an incentive – but getting to work (and home) 20–30 minutes faster each day, most certainly was!
Yesterday I issued a reminder/warning that the March HHS report might stop at 3/29, leaving the last 2 (and by far the busiest) days of the official enrollment period, the 30th-31st to be moved over to the April report.
If HHS did this, the March report would appear to only include about 6.5M exchange QHPs, since another 600K would be moved to April, along with the additional 700K (give or take) enrollments from 4/01 - 4/15 (and even beyond).
On top of today's CBO report projecting a $104 Billion savings on the cost of the ACA over the next decade and their projection of 2015 premiums only going up slightly, this is a bit of unexpected news....
As hundreds of thousands of diabetics get health coverage under the federal law, insurance companies are aggressively targeting this glut of new patients, who are expensive to treat and often lax in taking medications and following their diet.
Insurers are calling diabetics when they don't pick up prescriptions or miss appointments. They are arranging transportation to get them to the doctor's office and some are even sending nurses on house calls in an effort to avoid costly complications that will have big impact on their bottom lines.
Well I'll be damned. Private, for-profit insurance companies actively assisting their customers in trying to stay healthy.
Exactly the way that the law was intended to work, I'd say.
