Oregon should pull the plug on the beleaguered Cover Oregon health insurance exchange and switch to the federal exchange, a technological advisory committee recommended Thursday.
The move is considered almost certain to be adopted by the Cover Oregon board, which meets Friday.
Changing to the federal exchange would cost about $5 million, while a partial fix to the Oregon exchange would cost more than $78 million based on an estimate from Deloitte, a Cover Oregon consultant.
OK, I lied; I do have two comments:
--First, residents of Oregon do still have 3 more days (today, tomorrow and Wednesday) to push their 2014 policy enrollments through the remnants of Cover Oregon, and I'm assuming that the current hobbled-together system will still be in place during the transition period for Qualifying Life Events, Medicaid enrollment and so forth.
Oregon continues to plug along, adding an impressive 3.8K more NET QHPs and 7.3K more Medicaid enrollees the past week...not sure if this runs through 4/15 exactly or if it includes yesterday as well (Oregon is one of the states going beyond 4/15), but I'm lining them up at 4/15 for the moment:
April 17, 2014
Update: Private coverage and Oregon Health Plan enrollment through Cover Oregon
Medical enrollments through Cover Oregon: 228,795
Total private medical insurance enrollments through Cover Oregon 1: 67,474
Oregon Health Plan enrollments through Cover Oregon: 161,321
Oregon's Medicaid figure hasn't changed, but the exchange QHP tally is now up to an unspecific 59K (assuming this is as of yesterday):
Cruse said he became a full-fledged enrollee on a Moda plan in February. He’s now one of 59,000 people in Oregon who enrolled in private insurance after successfully navigating through the often cumbersome Cover Oregon process. Another 140,000 enrolled through the site on the Oregon Health Plan.
UPDATE: OK, scratch that. Looks like this article was quoting the 58,833 "total" QHP figure from the most recent official press releaseinstead of the "net" figure which was exactly 3K less: 55,833.
Leaving this up since it's already posted but sorry about the mixup.
Oregon appears to be purging their old unpaid enrollments, for cleaner totals (along with the dental enrollments, which even I haven't really talked about)...I'm assuming this is through yesterday. Note that the Medicaid number doesn't include an additional 128K enrolled via their "Fast Track" program from earlier:
April 3, 2014 Update: Private coverage and Oregon Health Plan enrollment through Cover Oregon
Medical enrollments through Cover Oregon: 200,165
Total private medical insurance enrollments through Cover Oregon 1: 58,833
Oregon Health Plan enrollments through Cover Oregon: 141,332
Total private dental insurance enrollments through CoverOregon 1: 12,066
Net enrollments
Net private medical: 55,833
Net private dental: 11,208
Background: With three months of open enrollment completed, Cover Oregon is expanding the enrollment report beyond what is required by the federal Center for Consumer Information & Insurance Oversight to include net private insurance enrollments and also dental enrollments.
Van Pelt highlights the more than 300,000 "enrolled in health care coverage since October thanks to Cover Oregon ... and the Oregon Health Authority."
That figure includes:
55,000 people enrolled in private plans using the backup manual processing system set up to cope with the exchange's technology issues.
more than 120,000 people enrolled into Oregon Health Plan after the exchange forwarded their information to the state for processing, a workaround for the exchange's broken Medicaid interface.
125,000 people enrolled directly into the Oregon Health Plan using a streamlined system set up to bypass Cover Oregon.
OK, in addition to the appx. 7.041 million enrollments on the Federal exchange (HC.gov), I've brought CO, CT, DC, HI, KY, MD, MN, NY, RI and WA completely up to date, with all QHP data through midnight on 3/31 (some of the Medicaid/CHIP data is still missing, but that's a lesser concern at the moment).
However, I'm still missing the following exchange QHP data:
California: 22 hours (that's right...the current tally runs thru 2am on 3/31)
Massachusetts: 3 days (current is thru 3/28)
Nevada: 2 days (current is thru 3/29)
Oregon: 3 days (current is thru 3/28)
Vermont: 1 day (current is thru 3/30)
I can't tell you how frustrating it is to be this close to full data while still missing it.
So, how much is actually missing? Well, if these states were running at their prior average March daily rate, it would be
CA: 11,754
MA: 512 x 3 = 1,536
NV: 427 x 2 = 854
OR: 502 x 3 = 1,506
VT: 775
Total: 16,425
However, this obviously doesn't apply since the final weekend and especially yesterday were insane.
Another quick update from Oregon; at this point I'm pretty sure that the "Net" QHP number (which removes "terminations & cancellations") is the same as Connecticut--purging the tally of non-payments, adding Oregon to the 100% Paid column:
Medical enrollments through Cover Oregon: 178,057
Total private medical insurance enrollments through Cover Oregon 1: 55,177
Oregon Health Plan enrollments through Cover Oregon: 122,880
Net enrollments: Net private medical: 52,372
This brings Oregon's exchange QHPs up from 50,137 just 3 days earlier, or 2,235...745/day. Compare this with an average of 179/day in February (or 472/day for the first 3 weeks of March).
Medicaid enrollments haven't changed in this report.
In spite of their endless technical issues, Oregon is actually kicking serious butt in manually processing a mountain of paper applications. In addition, they're including some interesting extra info in their reports lately--including NET enrollments after cleaning out cancellations/etc (does this mean Oregon is now only including paid enrollments, then, like MA and WA??), as well as dental enrollments, which haven't gotten much attention from anyone:
Medical enrollments through Cover Oregon: 175,534
Total private medical insurance enrollments through Cover Oregon1: 52,654
Oregon Health Plan enrollments through Cover Oregon: 122,880
Dental enrollments
Total private dental insurance enrollments through CoverOregon 1: 10,628
Net enrollments Net private medical2: 50,137
Net private dental 2: 9,877
OK, the cutesy title is kind of a misnomer; my two previous entries didn't use that title originally...but they should have, and do now.
March 31st is supposed to be the final day to enroll in QHPs via the exchanges...but it's looking more and more as though that won't quite be the case in not two, not three...but possibly up to seven states now, including a couple whose websites have been working smooth as silk??
On March 7th I pointed out that due to Massachusetts having some 154,000 people stuck in health insurance limbo, they've been granted some sort of temporary extension, twice...out to as far as June 30th in some cases...
OK, the cutesy title is kind of a misnomer; my two previous entries didn't use that title originally...but they should have, and do now.
