Connecticut: QHP enrollment at 74.3K, Medicaid at 208.4K (Updated)

Looks like Access Health Connecticut is having a press conference even as I type this...

CT exchange update: 74,334 people in private insurance plans, 208,468 signed up for Medicaid

— Arielle Levin Becker (@ariellelb) October 16, 2014

As of April 19th, 79,192 people in Connecticut had enrolled in QHPs. Since their non-payment rate has been "in the single digits" (call it 8%), that means around 72.8K paid enrollees as of then.

If there are currently 74,334 enrolled, that means there are 2% more enrolled (and paying) today than there were 6 months ago, which is right in line with my projections as well as the national 7.3 million figure mentioned by HHS Secretary Burwell as of August.

Meanwhile, Medicaid enrollees via the exchange are now up to 208,468. This is only a small increase over a month ago (around 1,400 people), but there's a very good reason for that:

According to Ms. Becker, none of these 208K+ are renewals of existing Medicaid enrollees from last year. Now, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, only around 107K Connecticut residents were eligible as of last fall. Assuming this was roughly accurate, this strongly suggests that close to 100% of all eligible residents have now been enrolled, meaning the other half are likely to be "woodworkers".

In other words, there probably aren't that many CT residents left to enroll in Medicaid/CHIP at this point, which would explain the dropoff in new enrollees this month.

Also important to note:

Wadleigh, exchange CEO, says will be a big small business exchange kickoff in 1st Q 2015. Don't want to interfere w indiv open enrollment

— Arielle Levin Becker (@ariellelb) October 16, 2014

This is a wise move IMHO. There's gonna be so much confusion and fuss over the individual market enrollment period (especially renewals/etc) as it is, so it's a good idea to separate the SHOP push out from the noise.

UPDATE: Another tweet from Becker regarding the remaining uninsured folks left to enroll in Connecticut:

Madrak says realistic goal is about 2-3% uninsured; think about 73k people who are "truly addressable," about 1/2 could be enticed to enroll

— Arielle Levin Becker (@ariellelb) October 16, 2014

OK, so if there's around 74,300 enrolled in exchange QHPs at the moment, and they think they can nab another 36,500 or so, that means that the Connecticut exchange is looking at around 111,000 people as their 2015 enrollment target, or around a 50% increase.