Minnesota

Yup, it definitely looks like my "QHP sky is falling" warning from a couple of weeks back was a false alarm...or, as Dan Diamond noted at the time...

The first time @charles_gaba made a forecasting error was when he predicted he made a mistake. http://t.co/4hiufhbVAG

— Dan Diamond (@ddiamond) July 16, 2014

Indeed.

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.

And Minnesota breaks the quarter-million mark (QHPs/Medicaid combined):

  • Medical Assistance 147,310
  • MinnesotaCare 52,049
  • Qualified Health Plan (QHP) 52,233
  • TOTAL 251,592

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

For some reason people are geeking out about the news that Minnesota's uninsured rate has dropped by 40% since last fall. Don't get me wrong, this is fantastic news; I'm just not sure why it's getting more of a response than, say, New Jersey's uninsured rate dropping 38%, or especially Massachusetts' rate plummeting down from 3.6% to virtually ZILCH (around an 86% drop if you assume 0.5% today).

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.

Minnesota continues to quietly add enrollees to both QHPs (up 3,005 since the end of open enrollment) and Medicaid (up 44,567 since then):

June 9, 2014 

Health Coverage Type Total Enrollments 

  • Medical Assistance 136,303
  • MinnesotaCare 48,942
  • Qualified Health Plan (QHP) 51,500

TOTAL 236,745

That means Minnesota is averaging 51 additional QHPs per day during the "off season".

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

Huh. The Minnesota exchange just released updated data as of 5/22; this brings another 4 days of numbers into view:

.@MNsure enrollment as of 5/26/14: 127,712 in MA, 46,836 in MinnesotaCare and 50,793 in QHP. Total: 225,341. pic.twitter.com/uDzt8AHqcO

— MNsure (@MNsure) May 27, 2014

OK, so that's another 166 QHPs and 958 more people added to Medicaid in the past 4 days.

MN's off-season QHP rate is now 697 in 34 days, or 20.5 per day. If that holds steady, that's around 615 per month, or around 4,300 more QHPs by the time the 2nd open enrollment period opens on November 15.

Pages

Advertisement