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.
OK, I now have confirmation that the 200K Medicaid expansion figure from last week was not an error...in fact, Michigan's expansion program is now up to nearly 207K:
Healthy Michigan Plan Enrollment Statistics
Total Healthy Michigan Plan Beneficiaries: 206,842
*Statistics as of May 5, 2014
*Updated every Monday at 3 p.m.
Hmmm...this article about Michigan's final ACA exchange tally is very specific about the Healthy Michigan program (Michigan's ACA expansion program), claiming the total is nearly 200K total...but if so, this would be an increase of over 41,000 from just 3 days earlier, which I find hard to believe (though that'd be awesome if it's correct).
199,862 minus the 36,307 who were bulk-transferred over from the existing state program = 163,555. The update from just 3 days ago had the total as 158,654.
HOWEVER, it occurs to me that I may have actually assumed that the 158K figure included the 36K transferees...if it didn't, then this makes much more sense, since the difference over those 3 days is only 4,901 people.
If that's the case, then this is VERY impressive indeed, and I apologize for lowballing the earlier number! I'll go ahead and use the higher number for now; on Monday there will a new official update on the state government site, and I can verify things one way or the other:
"Healthy Michigan" is the plan which specifically refers to ACA expansion in MI only (36,307 of these are actually bulk-transfers from an existing program, already listed separately on the spreadsheet):
Healthy Michigan Plan Enrollment Statistics
Total Healthy Michigan Plan Beneficiaries: 139,774
A few days ago, Michigan's newly-expanded Medicaid tally sat at around 32,000, plus another 54,000 people transferred into the program from an existing state-run one, for a total of about 86,000 people.
Today that number has grown to over 109K:
Healthy Michigan Plan Enrollment Statistics
• Updated every Tuesday at 3 p.m.
Total Healthy Michigan Plan Beneficiaries (including ABW transition prior to April 1): 109,228
Total Enrollment in Healthy Michigan Plan after April 1: 72,921
Yesterday I posted an update for Michigan's just-started Medicaid expansion. Officially the number was about 32K, but there was a reference to "tens of thousands more" transferred over from an existing state-run healthcare program (similar to the 650K LIHP transfers in CA, the 107K transferred from Commonwealth Care in MA and so on).
Today, it turns out that "tens of thousands" actually meant a whopping 53,700 people:
Since April 1, Michigan has received 54,479 applications and enrolled 32,071 Michiganders into the Healthy Michigan Plan. The difference represents those with applications that are pending confirmation, others who were eligible but enrolled in different Medicaid programs or have applications in progress or have been denied. Prior to April 1, MDCH transitioned the previous Medicaid Adult Benefits Waiver population into the program with coverage beginning on April 1. These enrollment activities combined mean that Michigan has already enrolled 85,761 residents into the new program.
This is great news for two reasons...not only has the Michigan Medicaid expansion already shot up another 5K in just the past day or two, but at least 20,000 ("tens of thousands") more people have been added to the Medicaid tally due to bulk transfers (similar to the 650K LIHP transfers in CA, 107K Commonwealth Care transfers in MA and so on):
The Healthy Michigan program has received nearly 55,000 applications since April first. 32,000 Michiganders have already had their applications approved. And tens of thousands more have been moved into the expanded Medicaid program from a different state health assistance program.
