No, I don't plan on posting Minnesota updates every day, but I'm still amazed that they seem to be having no problems doing so with their (supposedly) "faulty" exchange website, while the HHS Dept (as well as the New York exchange) has made an official policy decision not to post any updates for (presumably) the full 7 month off-season period.
In any event, while there is indeed a small slowdown which seems to have kicked in since the COBRA extensions dropped out at the end of June, it's now looking more and more as though the huge drop I saw the first week of July was mainly a combination of a data entry error in Hawaii and the long 4th of July weekend in general.
Hmmm...as a follow-up to the last Hawaii update, I've taken a look at Minnesota (the 2nd of the 3 states which caused me to issue a dramatic off-season forecast drop). The results are...inconclusive:
latest enrollment numbers
July 16, 2014
Health Coverage Type Total Enrollments
Medical Assistance 156,032
MinnesotaCare 55,941 Qualified Health Plan (QHP) 52,325
TOTAL 264,298
That's 61 more QHP enrollees in 3 days (7/13 - 7/16), or about 20 per day. On the one hand, that's still way down from the 52/day that the state had been averaging from late April through the end of June. On the other hand, it's way up from the 2 (yes, 2) per day that MN was averaging over the first 2 weeks of July.
Hmmm...Minnesota's exchange QHPs continue to grow, but the rate has plummetted over the past couple of weeks, dropping from 52 per day through the end of June to just 31 in the past 2 weeks. While I've been expecting the rate to slow down somewhat, this seems like an awfully large drop for such a short period of time.
Combine this with Hawaii, which reported an actual loss of QHPs and I'm starting to wonder if I've misunderstood how the state exchanges are reporting their numbers. It's possible that they're including people who drop their coverage after a few months as well as those who add coverage, which would result in the official tally holding relatively steady over time. I'll have to look into this...
latest enrollment numbers
July 13, 2014
Health Coverage Type Total Enrollments
Medical Assistance 154,106
MinnesotaCare 54,877 Qualified Health Plan (QHP) 52,264
TOTAL 261,247
The QHP number is identical to what it was a week or so ago; I assume this is just a data entry issue. Meanwhile, both forms of Medicaid enrollment have gone up, by a combined 6,537.
latest enrollment numbers
July 8, 2014
Health Coverage Type Total Enrollments
Medical Assistance 152,041
MinnesotaCare 53,855
Qualified Health Plan (QHP) 52,233
TOTAL 258,129
As an aside, according to KFF, there were around 259,000 uninsured Minnesota residents eligible for Medicaid (pre-ACA + expansion) prior to January 1st. Assuming none of the 205,896 people who enrolled via the MNSure exchange were renewals (and they shouldn't be, according to the prior monthly CMS reports), that suggests that MN has now enrolled nearly 80% of all eligible residents who weren't already on Medicaid, leaving just 52,000 people to go, give or take.
Minnesota is posting updates almost daily (ironic given that both the federal exchange as well as NY State of Health are officially not posting any updates until November).
In addition to the QHP daily rate (about 24% of what it was during the normal enrollment period), MN's Medicaid total is up another 3,587 in just the past 6 days.
enrollment update
latest enrollment numbers
June 15, 2014
Health Coverage Type Total Enrollments
Medical Assistance 139,214
MinnesotaCare 49,618
Qualified Health Plan (QHP) 51,809
TOTAL 240,641
Still, this doesn't take anything away from Minnesota's accomplishment; Mazel Tov all around!
The uninsured rate in Minnesota has fallen by more than 40 percent since the Affordable Care Act's coverage expansion started, a new report from the State Health Access Data Assistance Center shows.
The analysis appears to be the first assessment of how a state's uninsured rate has changed since the insurance expansion began in October. It shows that, between September 2013 and May 2014, the number of uninsured Minnesotans fell from 445,000 to about 264,500.
OK, contributor deaconblues sent me a link yesterday which gave updates as of 5/27...but when I checked the link this morning, it was dated 5/28 and the numbers were all slightly higher!
If I'm reading this correctly, Minnesota seems to have decided to start posting daily updates now, which is ironic given that HHS has stopped issuing updates completely!
Frankly, for my purposes, the only way that this could be any handier would be if they included a hard "paid" count with each update, but they've repeatedly made it clear that they average around 95% so that's not a problem:
enrollment update
latest enrollment numbers
May 28, 2014
Health Coverage Type Total Enrollments
Medical Assistance 129,332
MinnesotaCare 47,328
Qualified Health Plan (QHP) 50,881
TOTAL 227,541
