Colorado: SHOP enrolls 1,055 Sm. Biz. employees in ACA health plans

If you take a look at the Private QHP spreadsheet you'll see a new column: "Private SHOP Market". This is for enrollees in the ACA's Small Business Health Options Program, basically the small business (fewer than 50 employees) counterpart to the individual/family exchanges getting so much attention.

Until now I haven't found too many references to SHOP enrollees, partly because the program itself simply hasn't really been pushed very hard yet. In the few cases where I have found solid enrollment figures, I've either lumped them in with the individual exchanges (DC, NM) or listed them under "Off-Exchange" (Direct) enrollments (VT). However, Larry Levitt of the Kaiser Family Foundation has recently confirmed that neither Direct (off-exchange) enrollments nor SHOP enrollments "count" towards the CBO's "7 Million" projection, so I'm being more diligent about separating them out.

It's important to note that these still represent actual people enrolling in actual ACA-compliant healthcare plans, which only exist thanks to provisions in the ACA itself, so they still count towards the grand total...just not towards the "7M Holy Grail".

With that in mind, I'm starting a concentrated effort to find these enrollments...and in the case of Colorado, they're right there on their Metrics report: 1,055 for 101 employers as of December 31st. Not much, but it's a start.