OK, I meant to post this yesterday but had to double-check a couple of things with the reporter first. He confirmed that a) the 750K figure was slightly outdated (NY announced a higher total enrollment figure shortly after he posted the story), b) these 10,000 people are indeed enrolled in New York's SHOP exhange for small businesses and are therefore not part of the individual private exchange QHP figure, and c) the 10K figure does include dependents as well as employees.
Therefore, NY's SHOP total just doubled, from around 5,000 as of January to 10,000 today.
Close to 4,000 small businesses across New York state have enrolled their employees in the state's online marketplace for buying health insurance.
The six-month-old market, called an exchange, has become a noteworthy part of the federal Affordable Care Act. The law aims to spark the largest expansion of health insurance nationwide sinceMedicare and Medicaid were created nearly 50 years ago.
As usual for NY, the official press release doesn't include the QHP/Medicaid breakout, but based on past experience someone will point me towards a news story that has it broken out within the hour...anyway, the combined total in the Empire State is now over 782,000:
ALBANY (March 28, 2014) – NY State of Health (NYSOH), the State’s official health plan marketplace, reported that as of 9 a.m. today, 1,130,600 New Yorkers have completed their applications and 782,472 have enrolled for coverage since the launch of the Marketplace on October 1, 2013. More than 70 percent of those who have enrolled to date were uninsured at the time of application.
Oregonians now have an additional month to apply for private health insurance. New deadline to apply is April 30. The Oregon Insurance Division and Cover Oregon urge people to apply now to get coverage as soon as possible and avoid potential end-of-month rush.
Thank you to new contributor JTP for this CNBC article, which finally brings some clarity to the "how many already had insurance?" question.
Until now, the only hard numbers available were from New York and Kentucky, which were reporting 70% and 75% of all enrollees as not already having insurance respectively. However, these numbers included both exchange QHPs and Medicaid enrollees, which made it difficult to parse what percent of QHP enrollees only didn't have insurance prior to their enrollment.
This article is more specific: The number for NY QHPs is 59% of QHP enrollees (vs. 90% of Medicaid), and in KY is, surprisingly higher, at 75% for each!
Ka-pow! This is the other big state exchange number I've been looking for this week (after California, of course). The New York State of Health exchange hasn't put out an official press release yet, but within the past hour they quietly updated the home page of their website with the new total enrollment number: 666,397.
Eureka! I just received an explanation from the New York Dept. of Health of the mysterious 40,000 QHP enrollment discrepancy between the February HHS report and the New York State of Health press releases--apparently the additional 40K are newly-added enrollees in NY's Child Health Plusprogram, which is privately operated (and thus not included under Medicaid/CHIP) but is also technically not an official "Qualified Health Plan" by the technical definition.
According to the NY DOH, the higher NYSoH enrollee numbers include both the technical QHPs as well as enrollment in the state's CHild Health Plus program. This program covers kids up to 19 years old, with subsidies given for families up to 400% of the FPL. Therefore, children who fit this criteria get enrolled in Child Health Plus instead of actual QHPs.
They've specifically confirmed that "over 40,000 additional children have been enrolled in Child Health Plus through the Marketplace."
The February HHS Report included some especially confusing numbers out of the two largest state-run exchanges, California and New York, as both seemed shockingly low given how successful they both seemed to be doing in the first half of the month.
In the case of California, they were kicking serious ass in the first half of February, averaging around 7,200 QHP enrollments per day. Unfortunately, a few days later the CoveredCA exchange was hit with a very nasty technical problem which brought things to a standstill for not the 3 days that I thought, but 5 days. Result? The daily average dropped from 7,200/day in the first half to only 2,800/day for the second half of the month:
Enrollment in Obamacare coverage slowed last month in California, hurt by a recent website outage.
New federal data show 868,936 Californians signed up for health insurance in the state's exchange through March 1.
I ran into a similar issue a month ago, and thought I had straightened it out, but there's a major disconnect between the official HHS numbers for New York and the NY State of Health press release data.
According to HHS, New York only enrolled 33,328 people in February:
UPDATE: On the down side, I was off by 4% this time around.
On the up side, I UNDERESTIMATED:
Actual Feb. enrollments: 942,833, for a total of 4,242,325 thru 3/01/14.
Sarah Kliff at Vox just announced that the February HHS report is expected to be released today at around 4:00pm. A few items in anticipation of that:
As I've noted several times, I'm projecting the report to total around 902,000 exchange-based private QHP enrollments for the month of February (technically 2/02 - 3/01)
If accurate, this would bring the cumulative total of exchange-based private QHP enrollments to 4.202 million (from 10/1/13 - 3/01/14)
From the data I have, the average daily enrollment rate in February was almost identical to that of January, which had about 1.146 million QHP enrollments. HOWEVER, the January report included five weeks of data (12/28 - 2/01), while the February report will only include four weeks (2/02 - 3/01). Therefore, even at the same daily average, it'll be about 20% lower no matter what.
Don't be surprised if Peter Lee of CoveredCA decides to steal some thunder by announcing that California has enrolled 1,000,000 QHPs all by itself either today or tomorrow. However, that would include the past 10 days, while the HHS number will only run thru 3/01.
If you want to get REALLY specific, call it 902,800 and 4,202,292.
I've been dead-on target 6 times in a row without hyping up my projections beforehand. This time I am hyping myself up beforehand, so I'll probably be way off...but as long as I've UNDERestimated the tally, I'll be perfectly fine with that...
The report will be released in about 5 minutes, but my kid gets home from school in about 10, so it'll be a good 20 minutes before I can really post anything. Feel free to follow Sarah Kliff of Vox in the meantime!
Thank you to new contributor JTP for this CNBC article, which finally brings some clarity to the "how many already had insurance?" question.
The February HHS Report included some especially confusing numbers out of the two largest state-run exchanges, California and New York, as both seemed shockingly low given how successful they both seemed to be doing in the first half of the month.
