Colorado

I noted last week that contrary to my concern that OE4 might get off to a slow start due to people holding off until after the election, the early enrollment numbers appear to be right on pace with my official projections after all. In fact, the single day's worth of data provided for HealthCare.Gov ("over 100,000"* enrollments on 11/09 specifically) is 17% higher than what I was expecting it to be, although obviously that could vary widely day to day. The numbers from Minnesota are also extremely impressive, running over 6x higher than the same period last year, that's mostly due to their unique enrollment cap situation, so that's not much of an indicator of any other state.

*(Update 11:55am: This Washington Post article gives HC.gov's 11/09 tally as 105K instead of simply "over 100K").

As I've been noting for a few months now, Connect for Health Colorado's monthly enrollment reports are chock full of data and confusing as hell at the same time.

As a result, I've started simply presenting them without much commentary. Here's the October report (remember, this is for currently enrolled 2016 policies, not 2017 Open Enrollment policies:

Things have actually been relatively quiet on the Colorado rate hike news front since June, when I first ran my projected estimates of requested rate changes for the 2017 individual market:

Well, today the Colorado Dept. of Insurance released their approved rate hikes for both the individual and small group markets. Unfortunately, I don't see an actual carrier-by-carrier breakout, but they do provide weighted averages by other criteria such as metal level, on exchange vs. off exchange and so on:

While it would be nice to have the averages weighted by carrier, the on/off breakout is kind of interesting because it also lets me know what the relative numbers are between the two. For the individual market, note that the on exchange weighted average is 20.9% vs. the off-exchange's 19.9%.

As I've been noting for a few months now, Connect for Health Colorado's monthly enrollment reports are chock full of data and confusing as hell at the same time.

As a result, I've started simply presenting them without much commentary. Here's the August report:

As I've been noting for a few months now, Connect for Health Colorado's monthly enrollment reports are chock full of data and confusing as hell at the same time.

As a result, I've started simply presenting them without much commentary. Here's the July report:

I've been trying to figure out how to read Connect for Health Colorado's enrollment reports for months now, and I thought I had finally cleared things up last month....only to have that rug completely yanked out from under me by CMS's Q1 Effectuation Report, which stated that C4HCO only had 108,311 people actually enrolled in effectuated healthcare policies as of 3/31/16 rather than the 115,890 they seemed to be reporting at the time...which, combined with other confusing numbers, made the May report's 143,430 figure seem awfully suspicious.

Last month I wrote an extensive piece about Colorado's Amendment 69 initiative, aka "ColoradoCare", which would be the latest attempt to achieve a state-level single payer healthcare system (or at least near-single payer; if enacted, it would replace all current healthcare coverage except for Medicare, the VA/TriCare and the Indian Health Service).

While I was generally supportive of the idea overall, I also concluded that:

For me, however, ColoradoCare addresses many of the criticisms I've had of Bernie's plan. I'm not necessarily "endorsing" it (I still have a lot more to learn about the details and the criticisms before I can do so), but the bottom line is that it's more realistic and far better thought out than Bernie's national plan is. This is the best opportunity for achieving single payer that you're likely to see anytime soon.

As I've noted the past few times that I've posted Colorado enrollment report updates, the way they report their numbers can be very confusing...which is doubly frustrating since the reports are also chock full of useful data as well.

Anyway, according to their latest report, when you add up the "effectuated enrollments WITH and WITHOUT APTC/CSR" (medical only), it totals 143,430 people as of June 9th, 2016...a slight drop from the 146,000 figure as of the end of April. As I noted last month, however:

Over 150,000 Colorado residents selected QHPs via Connect for Health Colorado during open enrollment this year, and the total CO individual market was well over 270,000 in 2014; as of today, it's supposedly up to a whopping 450,000 people, which sounds awfully high to me (nationally the indy market has grown by around 25% over the past 2 years, so 66% is an outlier):

In addition, Anthem has decided not to offer its PPO (Preferred Provider Organization) individual plans in 2017. In all, the Colorado Division of Insurance said Monday around 92,000 people with individual plans from Anthem, UnitedHealth, Humana, and Rocky Mountain Health Plans will have to find other coverage during open enrollment in the fall.

Many single payer advocates have been either confused or angry with me (to put it mildly) for not being a fan of Bernie Sanders's proposed national SP plan.

I've explained repeatedly that while I am a SP proponent, I just don't see it happening at the national level all at once. There are too many barricades and too many logistical, economic and political problems in doing so to make it remotely feasible to bring SP to the country in this fashion. In addition, I have major problems with the utter lack of detail in Bernie's plan.

HOWEVER, I've also repeatedly stated that I do strongly support getting the ball rolling at a smaller level first--either by partially expanding existing SP programs such as (Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP); consolidating existing private systems into larger risk pools (ie, merging the risk pools of the individual & small group markets, as a few states have done already); and/or by getting SP enacted at the state level, then using that as a model for other states and/or as a national model if it works out.