Many of the findings were things which I had been either predicting or documenting all year:
Enrollment through Healthcare.gov Was 5 Percent Lower in 2018 than 2017
Stakeholders Reported That Plan Affordability Likely Played a Major Role in Enrollment
HHS Reduced Consumer Outreach for 2018 and Used Problematic Data to Allocate Navigator Funding
HHS Did Not Set Numeric Enrollment Targets for 2018, and Instead Focused on Enhancing Certain Aspects of Consumers’ Experiences
We identified a list of factors that may have affected 2018 healthcare.gov enrollment based on a review of Department of Health and Human Services information, interviews with health policy experts, and review of recent publications by these experts related to 2018 exchange enrollment.
The short version is that they tried to make it look as though only 10.3 million of the 12.2 million people who selected Qualified Health Plans (QHPs) from the ACA exchanges actually paid their first month's premium and were actually enrolled (i.e., "effectuated"), or around 84%. They then tried using this "fact" as evidence of how the ACA was failing, etc etc, because this was supposedly down from 2016 levels.
The difference, as I noted at the time, is that the 2016 effectuation numbers were as of March, while the 2017 effectuation numbers were as of February. This made a big difference, because around 500,000 people who enrolled during 2017 Open Enrollment couldn't have been effectuated for February...because about half a million people enrolled between Jan. 16th - Jan. 31st, which meant their policies weren't even scheduled to begin until March.
A few days ago, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid released three important new reports on the 2018 Open Enrollment Period and trends in the individual market. There's a lot of data to go over, so I'm breaking my analysis into several smaller posts for easier readability.
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Releases Reports on the Performance of the Exchanges and Individual Health Insurance Market
Reports show individual market erosion and increasing taxpayer liability
Um...yeah, deliberately sabotaging the ACA a dozen different ways and cutting off CSR reimbursement payments, thus forcing the carriers to load CSR costs directly onto premiums, which in turn jacks up APTC subsidies accordingly, will have the effect of "increasing taxpayer liability"). Go on...
A few days ago, I ran a comparison of the average unsubsidized (full price) 2018 premium increases for each state which I had projected last fall against a study last month by the Urban Institute in which they reported the actual average premium increases, by state, of some of the ACA policies available on the exchange. Urban wasn't able to examine every plan, but they did a full analysis on the Lowest Cost Silver, 2nd Lowest Cost Silver (benchmark plan) and Lowest Cost Gold policies in each market and statewide.
Urban's analysis concluded that depending on how you looked at their data, the overall national average increase was between 29-32% year over year...versus my own national projection of around 29.7%.
I didn't fare so well at the state level: I was within 5 percentage points of their actual averages in 31 states, and within 10 points in 6 more. I was way off in the other 14 for various reasons.
OK, I'm finally able to get back to digging into the meat of the FINALLY just-released 2018 Open Enrollment Report from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid.
In Part 2, I'm looking at the actual 2018 Open Enrollment Period Public Use Files, which break out a ton of demographic info by state, county and even zip code depending on the state (some of it is available for all 50 states + DC, while other data is only available for the 39 states hosted by HealthCare.Gov).
First up: As I noted earlier today, there's around a 10,000 enrollee discrepancy between the national total I came up with back in early February and CMS's official total. I compared my state-by-state totals against CMS's report and found differences in 5 of the state-based exchanges:
NOTE: THIS IS A LIVE BLOG, SO CHECK BACK FREQUENTLY FOR UPDATES.
Yes, at long last (3 weeks later than last year, which itself was 4 days later than in 2016), the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid has finally released the official, final 2018 Open Enrollment Report.Let's dig in!
This report summarizes enrollment activity in the individual Exchanges during the Open Enrollment Period for the 2018 plan year (2018 OEP) for all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Approximately 11.8 million consumers selected or were automatically re-enrolled in Exchange plans during the 2018 OEP. An accompanying public use file (PUF) includes detailed state-level data on plan selections and demographic characteristics of consumers. The methodology for this report and detailed metric definitions are included with the public use file.
Regular readers know that I've developed a tradition over the past three years of tracking the average unsubsidized premium rate increases for the ACA-compliant individual market, painstakingly poring over the rate filings for every carrier in every state and running a weighted average by their market share.
Every year there are numerous challenges and headaches which get in the way, including things as obvious as "not every carrier publishes the number of enrollees they have covered" to complex situations like "carrier X is dropping out of the on-exchange market in half the counties of the state but is sticking around in the off-exchange market". In addition, many carriers submit an initial rate request...followed a few months later by a revised one...neither of which might end up matching the final premium changes approved by state regulators. Sometimes there may be 2-3 more revised filings along the way which muddy the waters even further.
The Washington Health Benefit Exchange today announced that 209,802 customers used Washington Healthplanfinder to purchase a Qualified Health Plan (QHP) for 2018 coverage during the most recent open enrollment period. This total is a nearly three percent increase over last year and is 50 percent higher than the number of enrollees recorded following the first open enrollment period in 2014.
Minnesota's 2018 Open Enrollment Period was a month longer than the official half-length period pushed by HealthCare.Gov, but was still over 2 weeks shorter than it had been in prior years, ending on January 14th, 2018. Even so, they reported a slight increase in year-over-year policy enrollees, ending OE5 with 116,358 QHP selections.
Typically, you'd see the official QHP selection number drop off noticeably by the end of the first quarter...usually by around 13% or so. Roughly 10% of those who select policies don't ever actually pay for their first monthly premium, and another 2-3% generally drop off after only paying for the first couple of months.
