Slowly but surely, Michigan looks like it may end up achieving 100% expansion enrollment by the end of the first year, an amazing accomplishment (especially considering that the GOP state legislature delayed the program by 3 months for absolutely no reason whatsoever, financial or otherwise):
Healthy Michigan Plan Enrollment Statistics
Beneficiaries with Healthy Michigan Plan Coverage: 307,143
(Includes beneficiaries enrolled in health plans and beneficiaries not required to enroll in a health plan.)
*Statistics as of June 23, 2014
*Updated every Monday at 3 p.m.
Yes, I know I just posted a Michigan Medicaid expansion update a few days ago, and the numbers since then are "only" up 4,000 since then, but this story has another important data point. Regular visitors should have noticed that the Medicaid spreadsheet and section of The Graph always seems to be somewhat higher than the CMS's occasional reports on actual Medicaid enrollment. The main reason is that there's a difference between Medicaid determinations and Medicaid enrollments; the HHS and CMS reports, along with the occasional state-level reports, generally only list how many people have been determined to be eligible for Medicaid. There's still a process that they have to go through in order to fully enroll.
Michigan is now up to over 57% of the 500,000 residents eligible for Medicaid/CHIP under the Affordable Care Act:
Healthy Michigan Plan Enrollment Statistics
Beneficiaries with Healthy Michigan Plan Coverage: 287,281
(Includes beneficiaries enrolled in health plans and beneficiaries not required to enroll in a health plan.)
*Statistics as of June 9, 2014
*Updated every Monday at 3 p.m.
As I noted last week, the whole "Obamacare is socialism!!" mantra, which was always stupid in the first place, looks even sillier now with the news coming in from state after state that more and more private insurance companies are jumping into the ACA exchange pool. Now comes news from my own state of Michigan that the number on the exchange for the 2015 open enrollment season will climb from 13 to a whopping 18:
LANSING — Additional insurers are asking to join Michigan's Health Insurance Marketplace.
The state said today that it has received filing information from 18 health insurance companies wanting to be included in 2015 — five more than participated last year.
Department of Insurance and Financial Services Director Ann Flood said state residents seeking coverage through the marketplace will have even more plans to choose from and that "increased competition helps keep premiums lower."
Michigan is now up to over 57% of the 500,000 residents eligible for Medicaid/CHIP under the Affordable Care Act:
Healthy Michigan Plan Enrollment Statistics
Beneficiaries with Healthy Michigan Plan Coverage: 287,281
(Includes beneficiaries enrolled in health plans and beneficiaries not required to enroll in a health plan.)
*Statistics as of June 9, 2014 *Updated every Monday at 3 p.m.
OK, looks like expansion Medicaid enrollments are starting to slow down here in Michigan; only about 8,000 more people signed up over the past week. Still, that's 55% of the half a million total Michiganders estimated to be eligible for the expanded program:
Healthy Michigan Plan Enrollment Statistics
Beneficiaries with Healthy Michigan Plan Coverage: 276,662
(Includes beneficiaries enrolled in health plans and beneficiaries not required to enroll in a health plan.)
*Statistics as of June 2, 2014
*Updated every Monday at 3 p.m.
Add another 10,000 enrollees onto the total. Michigan's ACA Medicaid expansion now stands at 84% of the first-year goal, or 54% of the half-million estimated to be eligible for the program:
Healthy Michigan Plan Enrollment Statistics
Beneficiaries with Healthy Michigan Plan Coverage: 269,473
Michigan continues to quietly enroll thousands and thousands of people in ACA-expanded Medicaid, having already reached 81% of the 320K first-year goal in just 7 weeks (or, alternately, 52% of the total eligible for expanded Medicaid state-wide):
Healthy Michigan Plan Enrollment Statistics
Beneficiaries with Healthy Michigan Plan Coverage: 259,007
Michigan may have been 3 months late to the Medicaid expansion game, but once we got started, things really took off. The original target was 320,000 adults in the state...and MI has already reached over 74% of that goal:
Healthy Michigan Plan Enrollment Statistics Total Healthy Michigan Plan Beneficiaries: 237,329
*Statistics as of May 12, 2014
*Updated every Monday at 3 p.m.
My own calculations (based on KFF.org data) give the total number of Michigan residents eligible for Medicaid expansion as about 500,000; even at that number, 237K still represents over 47%, which is fantastic.
ORIGINAL POST: MAY 2014. UPDATE BELOW: OCTOBER 2017.
As regular readers of this site know, I make no bones about my personal politics. I'm very much a progressive Democrat, and my ideology comes out from time to time in my commentary. However, I do my best not to allow that to influence the data or how I present it.
When the enrollment numbers sucked, I agreed that they sucked and recommended that the HHS Dept. be forthcoming with the data anyway. When the Hawaii exchange was still subject to the infamous Heartbleed bug a week or so after it was publicized, I called them on it publicly. When states like Massachusetts subjected a couple hundred thousand of their citizens to a shaky, uncertain "limbo" status due to their exchange being screwed up, I didn't try to cover that over. When a solid case was made that the "3.1 million" young adult figure that the Obama administration has been touting for months may actually be only half of that, I presented the argument, the source, the reasoning and make sure to include the lower figure on The Graph. When the RAND Corp. survey claimed that there have been an additional 8.2 million Employer-Supplied Insurance policies since last fall, I declined to add them to the total due to the bold claim and lack of any collaborating evidence (I still list this figure as a footnote, but am not including it on the Graph).
The numbers are the numbers.
I say all of this because the following is sure to cause quite a bit of controversy...but a) it's related to the ACA, b) it's a serious issue and c) it's horrifying.
