MNsure Extends Enrollment Deadline for January 1 Coverage to December 31
MNsure sent this bulletin at 12/19/2014 11:34 AM CST
December 19, 2014
MNSURE: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
MNsure Extends Enrollment Deadline for January 1 Coverage to December 31
Decision follows transfer of enrollment information to insurance carriers and aligns enrollment deadlines for January 1 coverage
ST. PAUL, Minn.—In an effort to provide more time for Minnesotans who qualify for financial help available only through MNsure, the organization today announced it would extend the enrollment deadline to December 31 for January 1 coverage.
Minnesotans must now enroll in coverage through MNsure by noon on Wednesday, December 31, to have their coverage effective on January 1, 2015. The change comes at a time of high interest in MNsure and as many health insurance companies recently extended their own enrollment deadlines for January 1 coverage.
As of Thursday the 12th, MNsure had enrolled about 14.4K people for private 2015 policies. Thanks to the December Surge Weekend, this has jumped up by more than 9,300 more:
Latest Enrollment Numbers
December 17, 2014
Health Coverage Type Cumulative Enrollments
Medical Assistance 17,888
MinnesotaCare 7,681 Qualified Health Plan (QHP) 23,797
TOTAL 49,366
Hmmm...MNsure is currently enrolling people at 3x the rate they did all of last year. Assuming that this doesn't include automatic renewals, that's pretty good. They bumped their enrollment deadline for January coverage out until Friday afternoon (4:30pm, for some reason), which is even better.
UPDATE: According to this Modern Healthcare article, only about 42% of MN's enrollments to date are renewals. In one sense, this is good since it suggests that they still have a good 31K potential renewals to work with.
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.
Even I was surprised when I read that Minnesota's ACA exchange, MNsure, was projecting to more than double their 2015 enrollment figure. Yes, other states like Massachusetts are expected to increase their numbers severalfold, but it always seemed like a stretch for Minnesota, especially with their largest 2014 participant, PreferredOne, dropping out this year. They hit around 50K last year and were originally projecting to hit over 100K this time around.
Sure enough, they've decided to walk that number back a bit, down to 67K...which would be an increase of only 38% over the
48,495 they enrolled during the first open enrollment period:
MNsure on Wednesday said it was cutting by about one-third the number of people it expects will enroll in private health plans through the exchange for 2015.
That means MNsure will also see a drop in revenue, although officials say they expect to end the fiscal year next June with no red ink.
Huh. OK, I wasn't expecting MNsure's update until Friday this week (they put it out on Wednesday last week due to Thanksgiving), but fair enough:
Latest Enrollment Numbers
December 3, 2014
MNsure will release 2015 enrollment metrics weekly, and will present a more robust metrics summary to the MNsure Board of Directors at each regularly-scheduled board meeting. During weeks that MNsure is closed on Friday, the enrollment metrics update will be released earlier in the week.
Health Coverage Type Cumulative Enrollments
Medical Assistance 8,874
MinnesotaCare 2,954 Qualified Health Plan (QHP) 7,106
TOTAL 18,934
MNsure is running around 54% higher than their 2014 daily average so far, FWIW.
I just got off the phone with Christopher Snowbeck of the Star Tribune in Minnesota, who informed me that MN has a rather unique state law which, combined with the company dropping out of the ACA exchange, could have a serious impact on up to 23,500 residents who enrolled in policies via PreferredOne earlier this year.
To recap: MNsure, Minnesota's ACA exchange, enrolled roughly 48,500 people in private policies as of April. Unlike the 16% national attrition rate since then, Minnesota's ACA policies have retained 97% of their enrollments as of October (it's still at around 47,000 as of now out of 55,000 total enrollees to date). About 60% (33,000) of the total were through PreferredOne, although according to my sources, a good 10K of these have already moved on to other types of coverage (either a competitor, ESI, Medicare, Medicaid or whatever).
So, that leaves around 23,500 people still currently enrolled in MNsure-based PreferredOne policies as of October 15th.
OK, this is excellent. Minnesota has not only updated their official Enrollment Update page for the first time since #OE2 started, they've also clarified exactly when it will be updated (over the off-season it was scattershot, although they sometimes updated it daily:
Latest Enrollment Numbers
November 21, 2014
MNsure will release 2015 enrollment metrics weekly, and will present a more robust metrics summary to the MNsure Board of Directors at each regularly-scheduled board meeting. During weeks that MNsure is closed on Friday, the enrollment metrics update will be released earlier in the week.
Health Coverage Type Cumulative Enrollments
Medical Assistance 4,119
MinnesotaCare 1,215 Qualified Health Plan (QHP) 2,551
TOTAL 7,885
That's 2,551 QHPs in (less than) 7 days, or 364 per day so far.
For comparison, last year they averaged 242 per day (and remember, that included the massive spikes in December and late March/early April).
Plus, of course, we have the reset Medicare/MinnesotaCare numbers to plug in.
