Nevada: Lousy payment rate, but net attrition either decent or positive!

I addressed Nevada's apparent attrition rate about a month and a half ago. At the time, it appeared to be a fairly ugly 7.7% per month...relative to the "high water mark" of paid enrollments they had achieved in July of around 38,000.

However, since then I've realized that given the high amount of churn during the off-season as people enter and leave the marketplace, a far more accurate measure is the number of current enrollees relative to the April tally, since that was the "8.02 Million Total / 7.06 Million Paid" figure that everyone was focusing on anyway. Doing it this way is also far more consistent, since there's a hard 4/19 number to compare against for every state instead of it being all over the map.

In the case of Nevada, I've just received word that the current number of people enrolled in exchange QHPs is exactly 32,460 as of mid-October.

Now, the 4/19 tally for NV was 45,390. Compared against that, this number would stink, at more than a 28% attrition rate. However, that's not the number to measure against; as Republicans are so fond of reminding us, it's only "How many have PAID!!!" which counts as an actual enrollment. For Nevada, that number was only 32,365. That number would eventually reach 35,700 a month or so later, but that's a separate issue.

Yes, that's correct: There are actually 95 more people currently enrolled/paying their premiums for exchange QHPs today than there were back in April...an increase of 0.3% over the past 6 months.

Alternately, I suppose you could go with the 35.7K figure as your base point, in which case the drop would be about 9% over the past 5 months.

Here's where the spin comes in, of course: If you want to use the 4/19 paid number as your base, then it means that over 28% of the open enrollment period additions didn't pay up, which truly stinks..but it also means that you have to admit a net gain since April.

On the other hand, if you prefer to use the higher 5/29 figure, you're saying that about 21% never paid up (bad but not horrible), and another net 9% have dropped their policies since May (which is...not bad at all, really).