Wow! I'm impressed! I know Massachusetts said they'd be issuing daily enrollment reports during weekdays, but I really didn't think they'd have time to do so today. Then again, their deadline isn't until next Tuesday (the 23rd), so I guess things aren't too crazy in the Bay State.
Anyway, let's take a look...
Well, they haven't officially updated the "QHP plan selection" tally in a week or so, but I'm reasonably certain that the % of "eligibility determinations", which had been hovering around 50-55% until about a week ago, should have worked it's way up to perhaps 60% in recent days. Assuming I'm correct about this, their QHP selection total should be roughly 52,600 by now, though I'll knock off 600 out of caution and go with 52K even.
Again: During the 2014 open enrollment period, MA only nabbed less than 32K during the full 200-day period, so they're already 60% ahead of last year less than 1/3 of the way through this one.
Meanwhile, they've also added 84K people to Medicaid as well.
Hmmmmm...MA has switched their weekly reports from Mondays to Fridays, which is fine...except that until now the weekly versions also included actual hard "QHP plans selected" data.
This one...doesn't. It includes all the other weekly stuff but not the actual plans selected (aka "total enrollments" by my lingo). As a result, I'll still have to do an estimate based on the Eligibility Determinations...which in this case is a total of 83,988.
Assuming that the % of QHP determinations which have already led to actual plan selections is up to around 60% per day by now (up from around 52% a week or so ago), that should mean roughly 44,800 QHP selections to date. To be cautious, however, i'll knock it down to an even 44K for now.
And, again, Medicaid (MassHealth) enrollments are already up to 72,175 people.
Wow...HUGE data dump today! First California (well...half of it, anyway); then HC.gov (37 states); now, of course, Massachusetts' daily snapshot.
Another 4,725 QHP determinations. Assuming 60% of those have selected plans already, that should bring the total to around 42,100 to date...or 33% higher than MA's total 2014 enrollment tally.
Meanwhile, they've also hit 68.1K Medicaid enrollees.
Again, I don't have the hard QHP selection numbers for the past 5 days, but assuming 60% of the QHP determinations have also selected a plan, the total should be roughly 39,300 as of last night.
In addition, Massachusetts' MassHealth (Medicaid) enrollments have reached 64,155 with immediate effect:
Massachusetts is now on track to enroll a minimum of 154,000 people...and that's not including the mid-December/mid-February surges which are sure to come.
MASSACHUSETTS: The MA Health Connector allows for online premium payments (and in fact, payments have to be made to the exchange, not to the insurance company itself). The good news is that the website & billing system appear to be working properly this year, a vast improvement over last year's disaster. The bad news (or, odd news anyway) is that for some reason the system requires you to pay using only direct electronic fund transfers or a written check--it does not accept credit card payments!
I don't know if this is for technical reasons (which I doubt) or policy reasons (avoiding the 2.5% transaction fees or whatever), but it seems very odd to me.
HAWAII: Not only hasn't the HI Health Connector provided any enrollment updates since open enrollment started again on November 15th, they haven't even updated their enrollment report section since July 26th! Guys, either post an update or at least remove the link entirely; keeping it as is, locked in on 7/26 is just embarrassing.
Hmmm...for some reason, the MA Health Connector chose to give a daily report today instead of the weekly report which they've been doing on Mondays.
On the one hand, this is OK because it still includes the daily breakdown of QHP determinations. On the other hand, the weekly reports gave the hard QHP selection numbers, which aren't included here.
I'm going to assume that the ratio of actual selections has moved up to around 60% over the weekend (from the 48-50% it was at earlier) as we move towards the January cut-off point. If so, that means that QHP selections in Massachusetts should now be well above the 2014 total (31,695) and should be somewhere around 36,400 as of last night:
Meanwhile, Medicaid (MassHealth) enrollments have broken the 60K mark; I've been informed that these are effective immediately.
Another day, another 2,300 (estimated) QHP selections for Massachusetts. Assuming I'm right about that number (or even close to it), that means their total should now sit at around 31,750.
As I noted yesterday, Massachusetts has already reached their 2014 Open Enrollment Period total...in just 20 days.
At the current pace, MA is now on track to hit a bare minimum of 148K QHPs, without taking into account the double-surges around 12/23 and 2/15 to come.
OK, this particular experiment is specifically for HealthCare.Gov QHP enrollments only, not the national total including the state exchanges. I'm trying to see just how much of a correlation there is between the Massachusetts exchange (the only state providing daily enrollment updates) and HealthCare.Gov. Obviously there are a lot of differences between the two beyond scale, but so far they've tracked pretty closely on a number of criteria, so I want to see if that holds true on actual enrollments as well.
So, this is actually a twofold projection:
On Monday, I suspect the MA Health Connector will announce roughly 33,300 QHP selections as of the end of Friday, December 5th.
Then, on Wednesday, I'm going to assume that HHS will announce roughly 465,000 additional QHP selections in the 3rd week, for a total of around 1.23 million QHPs via HC.gov thorugh Friday, December 5th.
Should be interesting to see how far off I am on this...
The Daily Caller might be interested in the fact that while yes, the 2nd week numbers did drop substantially in both Massachusetts as well as HC.gov, as I expected, they've bounced right back up again in the third week (in MA, at least). In fact, if you look carefully you'll note that determinations are increasing a bit each day so far:
Anyway, using my 48.5% rule, I estimate that Massachusetts is up to roughly 28,200 QHP plan selections to date...or nearly 89% of their 2014 total. They seem to be averaging around 2,200 QHP selections per day.
That's right: It's conceivable that MA could hit their 2014 total (31,695 as of April 19th) by the end of business tomorrow. Assuming the "selected plans" percentage has gone higher than 48.5% this week, it's even conceivable that they'll hit it today.
Meanwhile, Medicaid enrollments are about to break the 50,000 mark as well.
Massachusetts continues to steam ahead: Assuming at least 48.5% of QHP determinations have already selected policies, they should be at roughly 26,000 QHPs through last night, plus another 45,687 added to Medicaid.
If so, MA has reached 82% of their 2014 total in 18 days, and is on their way to a bare minimum of 134K even without the double-surges around 12/23 and 2/15.
Again, I'm expecting as many as 300K Bay Staters before the dust settles in February.
