I talked about this a couple of weeks ago, but given that the March HHS report should be released sometime this week (unless it's delayed due to the craziness of the late-March surge), I thought it was important to post again:
The March HHS Enrollment Report may leave off March 30th and 31st, and therefore leave 600,000 exchange QHP enrollments to be tacked onto the April report instead.
Every one of the prior 5 HHS reports on ACA enrollments has been tied to the calendar week instead of the calendar month, cutting the tally off on whatever Saturday happens to fall closest to the end of that month:
His Tweet was intended as snark, of course, but at least a couple of people didn't appear to get the joke, and actually think this means I'm either hypocritical or some sort of 11th Dimensional Chess-playing Double Agent Mole working for the Koch Bros. Not sure how that would work, exactly, but whatever.
OK, I actually do have one update today (it's 8:30 at night and my kid is getting ready for bed).
When I first learned that Washington State's off-exchange total was a whopping 2.2x that of their exchange-based enrollments back on February 20th, I casually noted that if that held true nationally, it would make the off-exchange QHP tally easily 7.7M or higher ...and this was back when the exchange QHPs were only around 3.5M.
However, I also tried to be cautious in my "official" estimate, keeping it to around 4M or so since I didn't know how many there really were beyond the 300K (later 560K) or so I had documented at the time. After all, other states would likely have a much lower ratio of Off- to On-exchange QHPs; In Wisconsin, for instance, Off-Exchange QHPs were only about 23% as high as exchange-based.
As I noted at the time, this puzzled me because around "mid-March" (the point at which the vast bulk of survey responses had come in), the actual number of exchange QHPs was roughly 1 million higher, around 4.9M.
The survey itself lists a +/- 1.1 million margin of error for that figure, but it still didn't make much sense to me, since the official HHS report through 3/01 (2 weeks earlier) was already 4.24 million.
At first, I figured that perhaps they were lopping off about 20% to account for the unpaid enrollments. This would make the 3.9M figure correct, but there was no mention of payments in the survey.
Maryland's press releases are getting shorter and more abrupt. With the enrollment period wrapping up and their exchange site still an utter mess (and about to be completely scrapped and replaced), this isn't terribly surprising.
Still, this is up another 2,184 QHPs and 16,420 Medicaid enrollees in the past week, which isn't too bad, all things considered.
Through April 9, 2014, 65,186 Marylanders have chosen to enroll in qualified health plans through Maryland Health Connection. As of April 8, 248,495 have gained Medicaid coverage in 2014 and remain active in Medicaid.
Enrollments in qualified health plans since March 31 include 2,229 enrollments completed with assistance from a dedicated team responding to Marylanders who contacted our 1-800 hotline and other channels to request additional help.
I think this is the first Nevada update I've posted which didn't come from the Nevada Health Link's Twitter feed. Technically only 28,208 have actually paid their first premium so far, but another 4,332 have scheduled their payment which is certainly a huge step ahead of having "enrolled but not even arranged for a payment" (and my model has 7% of this total being lopped out for potential non-payment anyway). So, 32,540 it is until further notice.
And the number of people who enrolled in and paid for a qualified health plan through the exchange hit 28,208 on April 5, up from 25,899 people on March 31. Another 4,332 consumers have scheduled payments.
Yesterday, at around the same time that (outgoing) HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius confirmed my estimate that ACA exchange QHP enrollments had hit 7.5 million people, Edward Morrissey wrote an article over at Yahoo News claiming that (wait for it) the HHS Dept. was "cooking the books":
Last week, that [the ACA being here to stay] sounded like wishful thinking. Two new studies released this week prove it.
The studies that he uses are the Rand Corp. survey and a study released by Express Scripts regarding prescription drug coverage. I'm not even going to get into the Express Scripts study, because Mr. Morrissey makes so many errors in the Rand section I don't even think it's necessary to continue beyond that:
While the White House can claim credit for a net increase of 9.3 million insured and a lowered uninsured rate from 20.5 percent to 15.8 percent, the data provides a significantly different picture than that painted by President Obama and the ACA’s advocates.
This is great news, but I have to reduce Ohio's Medicaid total by about 54,000 due to a bit of sloppy double-counting on my part. However, there's another (potential) 120K in the batter's box:
More than 106,000 Ohioans have signed up for Medicaid under an expansion of the taxpayer funded health program, while thousands of others are waiting to hear whether they are deemed eligible.
...Ohio's monthly report on Medicaid caseloads shows that 106,238 residents had enrolled under the extension as of March 31. That's about 29 percent of the roughly 366,000 newly eligible people estimated to sign up by the end of June 2015.
More than 345,000 people have sought Medicaid coverage through the state's benefit site since Oct. 1. About 65 percent of the applications have been resolved, while roughly 120,000 are still pending. Many of those cases await eligibility determinations by the state's largest counties.
