On December 15, Access Health CT announced a one-month extension for 2019 enrollment. The exchange had planned to end enrollment on December 15, but the new deadline is January 15. People who enroll between December 16 and January 15 will have coverage effective February 1, 2019.
Two weeks ago I reported that Access Health CT, Connecticut's ACA exchange, had enrolled 12,777 people in 2019 ACA exchange policies, running neck and neck with last year. This included active renewals and new enrollees only.
HARTFORD — Enrollment in Access Health CT is higher this year than it was last year at this time, but time is running out.
Officials said they’ve enrolled 9.685 customers who are new to the exchange this year, and they’ve auto-enrolled more than 91,000 customers who purchased plans with them in 2018. That brings total enrollment up to 101,054 individuals as of Nov. 30.
Last year, about 90,428 individuals had enrolled by this time.
HARTFORD, CT — The number of customers purchasing plans through Connecticut’s insurance exchange is around what it was last year in the first two weeks of open enrollment.
Since Nov. 1, 12,777 customers have shopped and purchased a plan for 2019, according to Access Health CT officials. That means about 85,000 enrollees have yet to renew into a 2019 policy.
...Traffic on the website is trending about 18 percent higher than it was at this time last year, according to Access Health CT’s Director of Technical Operations and Analytics Robert Blundo.
...An estimated 60 percent of customers are picking plans that are different from their plan in 2018 and that’s compared to only 18 percent who were changing their plans last year. It also means there are a higher percentage of customers using brokers to help them make a decision about the health plan that’s right for them.
For months now, I've been trying to get people to understand that when it comes to sabotage of the Affordable Care Act, especially in terms of individual market premium increases, you have to include the impact of actions taken by Donald Trump and Congressional Republicans in BOTH 2017 and 2018, not just 2018 alone.
In 2017, the single largest factor in the ~28% average national unsubsidized premium increase for ACA plans was Donald Trump's cutting off of Cost Sharing Reduction (CSR) reimbursement payments to carriers. This alone accounted for fully half of the 2018 increase. However, there were other, smaller actions taken which added up to another 3% or so: Slashing the Open Enrollment Period in half, CMS slashing the marketing budget for the federal exchange down 90%, slashing the outreach/navigator budget down 40% and so on.
The Connecticut Insurance Department is reviewing 14 health insurance rate filings for the 2019 individual and small group markets. The filings were made by 10 health insurers for plans that currently cover about 293,000 people.
Two carriers – Anthem and ConnectiCare Benefits Inc. (CBI) – have filed rates for both individual and small group plans that will be marketed through Access Health CT, the state-sponsored health insurance exchange.
The 2019 proposed rate increases for both the individual and small group market are, on average lower, than last year:
This post actually has almost nothing whatsoever to do with the Affordable Care Act itself.
Every year I dig through hundreds (thousands?) of insurance premium rate filings for carriers in every state. For the most part I ignore everything except for my core focus area, the Individual Market, although on occasion I also try to run analysis of the Small Group market filings as well. I don't really pay much attention to the Large Group market filings.
However, there's a bunch of other types of health/medical insurance as well, and one which I've written next to nothing about since I started the ACA Signups project is also one which is becoming increasingly important as the Baby Boomer generation retires: Long-Term Care insurance.
To illustrate my point, here are a few recent premium rate increase filings from carriers in Connecticut:
On another note, I also want to use this as an opportunity to point out that maintaining quality health insurance coverage needs to be a priority year in and year out. Jenks notes that "Pregnancies are often unplanned, making limited enrollment periods impractical for many women." But can't that be said of any medical condition? In fact, I would say pregnancy is one aspect of healthcare that's probably much more likely to actually be planned. While about half of pregnancies are planned, I doubt the same could be said for cancers, heart attacks, or car accidents.
In other words, while not all pregnancies are planned, overall it's a lot less "random" than most other expensive healthcare incidents.
Now that the 2018 Open Enrollment period is officially over in every state +DC, I've started compiling more detailed demographic breakouts of the data on a state-by-state basis. The official CMS report from the Assistant Secretary for Planning & Evaluation (ASPE) report should be released at some point in the next couple of weeks, but until then, I'll have to settle for whatever reports I can patch together from some of the state-based exchanges.
So far I've dug up final (or near final) data for six states: Colorado, Connecticut, Idaho, Maryland, Minnesota and Washington State. Collectively, these states only represent about 890,000 2018 exchange enrollees, or roughly 7.5% of the 11.8 million total, so I have no idea how representative they are nationally, but it's all I have to work with for the moment.
The type of demographic data available varies greatly from state to state, but a major data point available from all six of them also happens to be one of the more interesting points, especially this year, given the " CSR Silver Loading" gambit available in most states this year.
At this point, the only significant top-line 2018 Open Enrollment numbers missing are the final 10 days out of California (which could add perhaps 40,000 to the total) and a solid month of enrollment from the District of Columbia (23 days, actually, but they extended their deadline by 5 extra days, which may or may not be included in the final, official report from CMS). DC's tally through 1/08 was 21,352 QHP selections. Their all-time high was around 22,700 set in 2016, so I can't imagine that they added more than perhaps 2,000 more since 1/08. In other words, about 99.5% of the 2018 OEP QHP selections have likely been accounted for.
That means it's time to move on to...breaking down the demographic data! Woo-hoo! Parrrr-tyyyy!!
The big, official CMS report from the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) presumably won't be released for a couple of weeks, but some of the state-based exchanges are faster about posting their demographics. First up: Connecticut!
