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.
When I crunched the numbers for Minnesota's requested rate hikes, the results were pretty scary-looking; based on partial data, I estimated that the weighted average was something like a 37% overall requested increase:
Note that there were several crucial missing numbers: I didn't know the actual market share for several companies (I made a rough guess based on an estimate of the total missing enrollments), nor did I know what the requested increases were for Medica or PreferredOne, other than thinking that both were under 10%.
A team of actuaries at the Minnesota Department of Commerce are currently scrutinizing the proposed rates that have been filed for 2016, and final rates will be announced on October 1. But for now, four MNsure’s individual market carriers have proposed the following rate changes for coverage effective January 1, 2016 (market share is as of the end of the 2015 open enrollment period):
Hot off the presses, the Minnesota ACA exchange, MNsure, just held their monthly board meeting and released some new enrollment numbers:
That precise 64,000 QHP number is up 2,126 since April 13, while Medicaid and MinnesotaCare are (combined) up a whopping 34,538 people, which is pretty impressive.
Hmmm...this is a bit surprising. The last report out of MNsure stated that they had added 1,405 QHP selections in the 15 days from 2/21 - 3/08, or 94 per day. I assumed that as today's tax filing deadline approached, this rate would increase as procrastinators scrambled to get their taxes filed under the wire. Instead, however, this is their latest report:
61,874 - 61,109 = Just 765 people enrolling over the 36 days since the prior report, or just 21 people per day. ACA exchange enrollments have actually slowed down substantially over the past month compared to the prior 2 weeks (which were after open enrollment ended). If this slowdown is representative of the whole country, then instead of several hundred thousand #ACATaxTime enrollees, we might be looking at fewer than 100K. However, this isn't nearly enough to draw any conclusions from yet.