Throughout the first two years of the ACA exchanges, the DCI exchange's official enrollment updates were simultaneously clear & simple as well as frustrating. On the one hand, they break out the numbers quite cleanly, such as this one from October 21st of last year:
From October 1, 2013 to October 16, 2015, 173,090 people have enrolled in health insurance coverage through DC Health Link in private insurance or Medicaid:
25,702 people enrolled in a private qualified health plan,
125,261 people have been determined eligible for Medicaid, and
22,127 people enrolled through the DC Health Link small business marketplace (includes Congressional enrollment)
On the other hand, as noted above, these numbers are cumulative, dating all the way back to October 2013 when the exchanges originally launched. This makes the numbers shown kind of useless for the same reason that Chrysler stating that they've sold 100 million cars since the company was founded tells you nothing about how many cars they've sold so far this year.
The final 2016 deadline to enroll in a qualifying healthcare plan for policies starting coverage as of March 1st officially ended as of MIDNIGHT on January 31st.
As usual however, there are a few caveats to this...but not as many as the past two years:
If you look at the State-By-State OE3 enrollment breakdown, you'll notice that there are still 4 blank fields all the way down at the bottom, plus a special note regarding California:
If you take a look at the State-by-State chart, you'll notice that in addition to a few clarifications here and there, there are 5 states (well, 4 states +DC) all the way at the bottom labelled "NO DATA YET".
California insists, just like last year, on doing this weird thing where they release the number of new enrollees who have signed up on a fairly regular basis, but the number of renewals by current enrollees is kept a secret all the way into January. I have no idea why they do that, and it's pretty important given that we're likely talking about somewhere between 1.0 - 1.3 million people here.
On the other hand, at least they've posted data on their new additions. DC, Idaho, Kentucky, New York and Vermont haven't even done that much as of this writing.
Rep. Rusche asked what our target enrollment is for this cycle and what barriers we see in making those targets. Mr. Kelly said the team is focused on the 80% goal of 92,000 as our enrollment target.Premium increases are a potential barrier. Net premium is a relatively small increase for most consumers, and each consumer will experience something different depending Page 5 of 14 on their plan, their location, their carrier, etc. We feel that while the premiums are increasing the relatively small net premium increase will mitigate this barrier to a large degree.
When I asked for clarification, they informed me that:
We currently have 86,659 effectuated enrollments with Your Health Idaho, as of September 15. The 92,000 would also refer to effectuated enrollments.
This is a pretty minor 2015 exchange enrollment update, and one of the last ones I'll be doing before the 2016 Open Enrollment period kicks off, but I should squeeze it in:
From October 1, 2013 to September 23, 2015, 166,789 people have enrolled in health insurance coverage through DC Health Link in private insurance or Medicaid:
24,663 people enrolled in a private qualified health plan,
120,739 people have been determined eligible for Medicaid, and
21,387 people enrolled through the DC Health Link small business marketplace (includes Congressional enrollment)
As always, the DC exchange insists on giving cumulative totals since 10/1/13 instead of the 2015-only numbers, which isn't particularly useful. However, by comparing it against their earlier update, I can figure out the difference since then:
From October 1, 2013 to June 7, 2015, 125,478 people have enrolled in health insurance coverage through DC Health Link in private insurance or Medicaid:
Way back in May, the requested rate hikes on the individual market for our nation's capital appeared to average roughly 5.3%. Earlier today, the District of Columbia Dept. of Insurance, Securities & Banking (DISB) announced the approved rate changes for DC:
DISB announced Sept. 15 the approved health insurance plan rates for the District of Columbia’s health insurance marketplace, DC Health Link, for plan year 2016.
Eight carriers through four major insurance companies – Aetna, CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield, Kaiser Permanente and UnitedHealthcare – will have plan offerings for individuals, families and small businesses on DC Health Link when enrollment opens Nov. 1, 2015.
The DC exchange just issued a welcome-but-unexpected update; as usual, they do this weird thing where they're including the cumulative totals dating back to October 1, 2013, which is pretty much pointless (this would be like measuring how well Chrysler is doing in 2015 by counting every car they've sold since 1925).
From October 1, 2013 to April 26, 2015, 106,364 people have enrolled in health insurance coverage through DC Health Link in private insurance or Medicaid:
22,354 people enrolled in a private qualified health plan,
67,761 people have been determined eligible for Medicaid, and
16,249 people enrolled through the DC Health Link small business marketplace (includes Congressional enrollment)
The 2016 Rate Request Train continues to chug along; in addition to Oregon, Washington State, Connecticut and Michigan, I can now add the District of Columbia to the list.
The first thing to note about the DC market is that one of only two (the other is Vermont) in which all individual and small group enrollments are done through the ACA exchange; no off-exchange enrollees here. That makes things a bit simpler.
In addition, the DC Dept. of Insurance, Securities & Banking has also provided a handy table showing the year over year changes on both markets:
As you can see, DC has a pretty simple setup; 4 insurance companies operating in the Small Business (SHOP) exchange, only 2 of which are operating on the Individual exchange (and one of those, Kaiser, is only offering HMOs, not PPOs). An unweighted average of each gives the following:
From October 1, 2013 to April 26, 2015, 106,364 people have enrolled in health insurance coverage through DC Health Link in private insurance or Medicaid:
22,354 people enrolled in a private qualified health plan,
67,761 people have been determined eligible for Medicaid, and
16,249 people enrolled through the DC Health Link small business marketplace (includes Congressional enrollment)
From October 1, 2013 to March 8, 2015, 89,852 people have enrolled in health insurance coverage through DC Health Link in private insurance or Medicaid:
