Yesterday's press release from Covered California included a TON of important information about how they're handling the massive subsidy upgrade/expansion under the American Rescue Plan, but it left out one other critically important item which was caught by Inside Health Policy reporter Amy Lotven:
Insurers participating in Covered California have agreed to help move their off-exchange individual plan enrollees into the marketplace so they can benefit from the new Affordable Care Act subsidies available under the American Rescue Plan (ARP) and will not reset the deductibles, Covered California Executive Director Peter Lee said Thursday (March 18) in a webinar with reporters and key stakeholders.
...Off-exchange enrollees could get an average $500 premium drop, which means they could save as much as $12,000 under the two-year provision, Lee says. About 430,000 Californians and 1.5 million people nationally who are enrolled off-exchange plans are newly eligible for help, the exchange estimates.
Covered California, Community Leaders and Health Plans Highlight Key American Rescue Plan Provisions and Lay Out a Roadmap to Lower Premiums and Help Millions Get Covered
OK, Covered California hasn't actually released an official press release or Open Enrollment Report, but I have acquired a single slide which was delivered at a university presentation by Covered CA head Peter Lee the other day. It doesn't provide tons of detail but give the most important toplines (the way the graph breaks out the numbers is a little confusing but I figured it out:
Total QHP selections from 11/01/20 - 1/31/21: 1.63 million, a record high for the state
This is a 5.9% increase year over year from the 2020 OEP's 1.54 million (it says 1.57 million on the graph but the official CMS tally is 1,538,819).
Covered California Begins New Year With a Record Number of Plan Selections, Serving Those Hardest Hit by the Pandemic, as State Experiences Post-Holiday Surge of New COVID-19 Cases
The first major open-enrollment deadline is this week: Consumers who want their coverage to start on Jan. 1 need to sign up by Dec. 30.
The deadline comes as COVID-19 infections and deaths continue to rise across California, with hospitals overloaded with patients and limited ICU bed capacity.
Having health care coverage, staying COVID-safe and getting vaccinated when you are able to are critical to helping overcome the pandemic.
More than 1.2 million Californians are uninsured right now, even though they are eligible for financial help from Covered California, or low-cost or no-cost coverage through Medi-Cal.
Covered California’s open-enrollment period runs through Jan. 31.
There's a bunch of useful wonky data stuff, but for purposes of this entry, it's slides 18 & 19 which are of particular interest. Most state-based ACA exchanges don't launch Open Enrollment until November 1st, but Covered California opens up re-enrollment for current members earlier. Usually they let current members renew for the upcoming year as early as October 15th, but this year they moved that up even sooner, to October 1st.
As a result, while they haven't put out any official press releases about it, as of November 16th, over 1.4 million of their ~1.5 million existing enrollees had already been re-enrolled for 2021. In addition, they had another 32,000 Californians sign up in the first two weeks of November.
Covered California Joins African-American Health Leaders Urging Californians to Get COVID-19 Vaccinations and Encouraging Consumers to Get Covered in 2021
It's turned into an annual tradition: The official annual ACA Open Enrollment Period (OEP) runs from November 1st - December 15th, but most of the state-based ACA exchanges have later deadlines. hThen, right around the 12/15 point, it begins: One by one, some of the state-based exchanges announce further extensions of their deadlines to #GetCovered for the upcoming year.
In some cases they simply bump out the deadline for coverage starting in January, with the final "hard" deadline for February or March coverage staying where it is. In other cases they were never allowing Open Enrollment start dates past January to begin with, so it's the hard deadline which is being extended.
In any event, here's this year's batch of announcements; note that this list could grow longer over the next week or two:
