Washington State: Paid QHPs up 4,400, Medicaid up 17K

Hmmm...I'm hoping that either this weeks or last weeks press release from the Washington exchange contains a clerical error, because if both are accurate, it means that private QHP enrollments in Washington State all but dried up in the last week of February. They're showing an increase of paid enrollments from 101,857 (as of 2/20) to 106,281 (as of 2/27), which isn't bad (about 4,400 more)...but a decrease of unpaid enrollments from 82,249 to 78,041. This means that the total number of enrollees only went up by 216 during that week; the rest were all conversions of unpaid to paid. The good news is that this improves WA's paid percentage from 55% to 58%.

Meanwhile, WA's Medicaid expansion increased at a more reasonable rate, from 202,168 expansion-only + 102,238 woodworkers (304,406 total) to 212,633 expansion + 108,886 woodworkers (321,519 total), or by about 17,000 people.

Another way of looking at it: According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, prior to the ACA, WA had a total of around 959,000 uninsured residents, of which around 449,000 are supposedly eligible for Medicaid.

All 322,000 of the above Medicaid enrollees are newly added, leaving only around 127,000 still eligible for Medicaid, plus another 510,000 who presumably make up the uninsured QHP pool. Assuming that, say, 60% of the 184,000 QHP enrollees (including unpaid) were previously uninsured (New York is the only state to release that data, they have theirs at 70% but that includes Medicaid as well), that would mean that there's only 400,000 potential QHP enrollees left in the state.

Enrollments Completed

• Qualified Health Plans: 106,281
• Medicaid Newly Eligible Adults: 212,633
• Medicaid Previously Eligible but not Enrolled: 108,886
• Medicaid Redeterminations (Previously Covered): 333,859

In-Process Applications

• Qualified Health Plan Applicants – Need to Pay: 78,041