Massachusetts

This weekly dashboard report is really just an official breakdown of the numbers I reported a couple of days ago, as it only runs through 12/23, but it's still good to have an official confirmation of everything:

As of midnight last night, the Massachusetts Health Connector just reported:

  • 40,065 QHPs selected and paid for
  • 34,138 QHPs selected but not paid for yet
  • 74,203 QHPs selected total, with a 54% payment rate so far

MA has extended the payment deadline until 12/28, so the other 34K still have 5 days (including today) to make their first payment; if they miss that deadline but still pay up, they'll still be covered starting on February 1st.

Assuming 25,200 of these folks make their first payment by the 28th, they'll hit my 88% "rule of thumb" rate for January. Over 8,100 people made payments yesterday alone, so I'm not terribly concerned about this issue. It'll be interesting to see how many make the cut, given all the "but how many have PAID???" fuss and bother last year (last year, MA & WA were the only states which reported paid only numbers to HHS, but it was still messy in MA's case given their technical problems).

Today is the final day for Massachusetts residents to enroll in a private healthcare plan if they want coverage to start on January 1st. As of last night, they had a total of 248,711 eligibility determinations, of which 131,732 are for private QHP policies (the other 117K have already been enrolled in Medicaid, aka "MassHealth", which is impressive in and of itself).

So, how many of those nearly 132K people have actually selected a plan? Well, since open enrollment started on 11/15, anywhere between 45-55% of total QHP determinations as of that day have also selected a plan. If that was the case here, I'd say that the number is around 50%, or around 66,000, which would be an impressive 4,600 spike over yesterday's confirmed 64.1K.

UPDATE: OK, I've received the official total: As of midnight last night, 67,759 people had selected a policy, or 51.4%. I've also confirmed that about 47% had paid their first premium already...32,000 people, or more than the total enrollees as of last April.

On Friday I discovered that my estimate of roughly 60% of Massachusetts "determined eligible for QHPs" actually selecting a plan was way too high; the actual ratio was closer to 48% overall, meaning that my prior estimate of about 62K QHP selections was too high; the actual number was 53,490 as of Thursday the 18th, which is still excellent, just not as great as I thought it was.

Today I received confirmation directly from the exchange that total enrollments (ie, selected plans) are up to 61,470 as of this morning, which means that the ratio is indeed starting to move up, just later and not as quickly as I had thought (61,470 / 124,403 QHP determinations is just shy of 50%).

OK, it looks like my theory about MA's "QHPs as % of Determinations" theory was wrong; I assumed that it would have started increasing from 50% over the past week, intstead it dropped to about 48% (or held steady at 52% if you include the "plans in cart" which neither I nor the MA exchange is doing anyway).

Therefore, the bad news is that the official total is around 8,300 fewer than I thought: 53,490 thorugh yesterday. The good news is that this is still an excellent number, and there's still tens of thousands of people who've started the process who have until next Tuesday to wrap it up.

In addition, remember my snark from 11/16 about "ONLY 3.5% HAVE PAID!!"? Well, guess what: That percentage is up to 34%, and they still have 5 days to pay (I presume they're dealing with a flood of payments at the moment).

The Medicaid tally holds at 98,530 since it doesn't include yesterday.

Chalk up another 4,433 QHP eligibility determinations for MA yesterday. Assuming 60% of those have selected a plan, the cumulative total for 2015 should be up to around 61,800 people to date.

As of mid-April, Massachusetts had only enrolled a total of 31,695 people. That means that assuming I'm close, the Bay State should double their 2014 QHP enrollment by tomorrow.

In addition, their Medicaid enrollments are closing in quickly on the 100K mark (98,530), and should easily cross it tomorrow as well.

Massachusetts continues to chug along, with another 4.243 QHP eligibility determinations; assuming a minimum 60% plan selection rate, that should add another 2,500 or so to the total, for around 59K QHPs to date.

Meanwhile, Medicaid (MassHealth) enrollments have broken 94,000:

HUGE news day, of course. In addition to HC.gov overperforming my estimate by 6% (2.46M as of 12/12 instead of 2.32M), Maryland and Massachusetts are out with their latest numbers.

MA still isn't including an actual QHP selection update, but it should be roughly 56,600 based on the "QHP eligibility determinations" total of 103,591.

In addition, they're about to break 90K even added to Medicaid:

As you can see from the graphic I posted yesterday (and had to revise several times throughout the day), the official enrollment deadline for private policies starting on January 1st, 2015 has now passed for all 37 states operating via HealthCare.Gov, as well as residents of DC, Hawaii and Kentucky. It's certainly possible that any or all of these will announce some sort of "special circumstances" allowance for those who didn't make the midnight cut-off (10pm in Alaska), but I'm assuming those would be done strictly on a case-by-case basis.

OK, so what about the remaining 11 states?

Well, 4 of them (MD, MA, RI & WA) had later deadlines for January coverage all along: Maryland on 12/18 (Thursday) and the other 3 on 12/23 (next Tuesday).

New York and Idaho bumped their deadlines out from yesterday until 12/20 (Saturday), although Idaho had previously claimed that their deadline was 12/23, but are now claiming that it was originally 12/15. I still don't understand what happened there, but so be it: 12/20 it is for ID.

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