Minnesota: 69K QHPs, 258K Medicaid/MNCare

Minnesota's troubled MNsure exchange continues to quietly roll along through the off-season...

Cumulative QHP selections are up 1,093 since July 14 (42 per day), 2,937 since June 14 (52 per day), 5,059 since May 14 (58 per day) and 9,355 since the end of Open Enrollment on 2/21/15...or about 55 per day). Things have gradually slowed during the off-season, but not by much.

In just the last month they've also beefed up their Medicaid enrollment tally by over 16,800 and added 3,800 more to MinnesotaCare.

This report also gives some important additional stats, such as:

• Only 55% of QHP enrollees are receiving federal tax credits (APTC) and only 15% are receiving cost sharing reductions (CSR), vs. the 85% / 57% rates nationally. This is mainly due to MinnesotaCare, the Basic Health Program allowed for under the ACA (New York will be the 2nd state to implement such a program next year). MinnesotaCare is sort of a "Medicaid Plus" program which has obviously siphoned away a large portion of the lower-income enrollment pool in MN.
• MNsure's SHOP program is covering 1,345 people...which is actually down slightly from the 1,419 enrolled back in mid-February. Needless to say, the ACA's SHOP program hasn't exactly been a huge success nationally.

• The insurance provider market share breakdown is interesting, especially as it compares 2015 to 2014. With PreferredOne dropping out of the market, nearly 60% of the enrollees had to shop around, and it looks like they spread themselves out among BCBS, HealthPartners and UCare.
• Metal Levels are also interesting year over year...check out the 27% who chose Platinum last year, which goes against every ounce of conventional wisdom. I'm assuming the Platinum plans were severely underpriced at PreferredOne, leading to their downfall? Silver went up a bit, but Bronze went up disturbingly year over year; my guess is most of those folks would be better off with Silver, although the MinnesotaCare factor makes this difficult to be certain of.
• Finally, note that the age demographics stayed almost identical to last year.

• Holy Cats, check out the effectuated enrollments!! If I'm reading this correctly, 67,714 people are currently enrolled out of 69,059 total QHP selections...which means a retention rate of 98%, which I believe is unprecedented in any other state. I might be misunderstanding this. However, note the trend line...it's been quietly increasing even during the off-season, which is right in line with my own estimates nationally.