Massachusetts: 4,200 SHOP, Dental data & some other interesting tidbits

We're in a bit of an in-between phase this week. Open Enrollment is officially over, and the Tax Season special enrollment period doesn't start until Sunday in most states.

However, the Massachusetts Health Connector has provided me with a handy report which gives some interesting drill-down data. Most of it is stuff I don't really track anyway, but some of it I do and the rest may be of interest to some. I'm only focusing on a few items, the PDF itself has a bunch more:

• As of 3/09/15, they had 124,215 people actually enrolled (paid/effectuated) via exchange policies. This is lower than their last official paid number (125,402) because the additional 1,200 were already paid up for an April start date.

• This is one of the very few reports I've seen which tracks the exact attrition data month to month. That is, people who paid that month's premium but then terminated their policy later on in the month. As you can see, 1,791 people paid for January, but then cancelled their policies sometime in February. Another 408 paid for February but dropped it in March, and 50 people paid for March but apparently changed their mind almost immediately (although thes are more likely people who paid for January and February but then dropped out in March). The point is that this is going to be a rolling average from month to month; people are starting and terminating their coverage all the time, month in and month out.

Insurance carrier market share isn't of much interest to me except insofar as it impacts premiums or enrollment (ie, PreferredOne in Minnesota or the CoOportunity mess in Iowa/Nebraska). However, it's good to see a reasonably thriving market in MA.

There's only been one time that I've focused on dental plans, and that was the infamous #ObamaDentata incident last fall (where 393K policies were double-counted as full healthcare plans by mistake by HHS). Still, dental policies are important as well.

Eureka!! SHOP (Small Business) enrollments! This has been one of the 2 Holy Grails of ACA enrollment data for me (the other, of course, are off-exchange enrollments). I only had 2015 SHOP data from 7 states until today, so adding Massachusetts to the list is very helpful. 4,248 total covered lives. This is actually a bit higher than my estimate of SHOP running at 3% of the QHP total (4,248 is about 3.4% of 125,402), but again, that's gonna vary from state to state.