With the deadline approaching for individuals to renew healthcare plans purchased on HealthCare.gov, Aetna has begun to see a surge in customers for 2015, the insurer's new president said on Thursday during a meeting with analysts and investors.
HealthCare.gov has a Dec. 15 deadline for individuals to renew their 2014 plans or select new ones before it will automatically re-enroll them for next year. Enrollment for individual plans is open until Feb. 15, which were created under the 2010 Affordable Care Act, often called Obamacare.
Karen Rohan, whose appointment was announced earlier this month, said that the company expects a surge in enrollment over the next few days and that it was "starting to see" that already. Aetna sells these plans in 17 states.
For each of the first two weeks, HC.gov has reported that the total QHP enrollments to data are split roughly evenly between new enrollees and renewals, which I find rather interesting; I was figuring that the early days would skew more heavily towards renewals, perhaps by a 2:1 or 3:1 ratio.
Part of this could simply be different states cancelling each other out--after all, all enrollees in both Nevada and Oregon, which were shifted over to HC.gov this year, are being categorized as "new" since the enrollees had to start over again; between the two states, that's up to around 110,000 current enrollees who would be listed as "new" even if they were re-enrolling...so it's possible that there are other states with a higher "renewal" ratio which is cancelling those two out.
NOTE: I've decided to make "Short Cuts" the standard name for ACA-related stories which are interesting but which I just don't have time to do full write-ups on. I've also given up on trying to cram the headlines of each story into the blog entry title.
ObamaCare outreach campaigns across the country are diving deeper into the hard-to-reach uninsured populations such as rural areas with hopes of driving up enrollment in its second year, several state directors said Wednesday.
“We have a much better sense because of data from the federal government on where are the uninsured,” Ryan Barker, vice president of health policy for the Missouri Foundation for Health, said in a conference call hosted by Families USA.
The Michigan Primary Care Association said it is trying to “fill the gaps” of health insurance coverage by relocating a majority of its staff to rural, less-populated areas.
