BOOM, there it is: Washington State has been pretty quiet on the update front, due, no doubt, to having to clean up a rather embarrassing screw-up on the part of their IT systems integrator a week or so ago when over 6,000 account enrollments/payments were accidentally cancelled.
However, I'm very happy to report that not only do they appear to have resolved most of this issue (2/3 of the accounts have been restored so far), but they've released detailed, up-to-date data...and it's pretty damned impressive so far:
Updated enrollment totals are included below:
Qualified Health Plans - New: 10,082
Qualified Health Plan Renewals: 45,843
Total: 55,925
Washington Healthplanfinder Business
Accounts Created: 1,550
Total Completed Applications – Link Sent to Employees: 73
Total Enrollments – Employee Plan Selection Complete: 3
*Note: These numbers reflect QHP enrollments through Dec. 10 and Medicaid Enrollments through Dec. 4.
They also reported on the Medicaid (Apple Health) situation:
Until now, I've relied on states like Maryland, Massachusetts and Vermont, which have given out frequent 2015 enrollment updates, to point out how impressive the enrollment stats have been this time around; Maryland and Vermont are currently running at nearly 5x their 2014 pace, while Massachusetts is adding people at an astonishing 10x their 2014 rate.
However, these are pretty misleading, because all 3 of those states had such Godawful websites last year that it didn't take much to outperform this year.
Instead, consider states whose exchanges were already doing pretty well out of the gate last year, such as Colorado:
On the surface, this looks pretty good, but nothing jaw-dropping. 24,811 in 27 days is 919/day, or about a 50% improvement over 2014's 627/day.
However, break it out between the first 16 days and the next 11 and it's a different story:
The Maryland exchange just tweeted out a rough total enrollment number: 76K. It isn't broken out between commercial policies and Medicaid, but based on the trend until now it looks like it should be roughly a 56/44 split, or around 43,000 QHPs & 33,000 Medicaid/CHIP enrollees:
Beneficiaries with Healthy Michigan Plan Coverage: 474,372
(Includes beneficiaries enrolled in health plans and beneficiaries not required to enroll in a health plan.)
*Statistics as of December 8, 2014
*Updated every Monday at 3 p.m.
Now, obviously that 477K eligibility figure could be off (I had previously heard estimates as high as 500,000).
This is a nice article giving a status report on how things are going in Nevada (which, along with Oregon, scrapped their own ACA exchange last year and moved over to Healthcare.Gov). It includes a straightforward enrollment number: "more than 10,000" right in the title.
However, the wording of the article makes it unclear as to whether that number includes unsubsidized QHP enrollments or just the 85% or so who qualify for tax credits:
Compared to last year’s rollout, Nevada Health Link is showing stronger numbers so far in this year’s open enrollment.
More than 10,000 Nevadans have enrolled for subsidized health care plans through the state insurance program.
The enrollment numbers are good news and show signs of improvements at Health Link, Nevada’s online health care market.
At this time last year, only 6,000 people had signed up. It was Health Link’s first year online.
The comparison number below (6,000 last year) make it sound like 10K includes everyone, but the "subsidized" caveat makes it sound like it doesn't, in which case the total number should be roughly 11,700 or so.
I'll go with the lower 10K number for now, however.
When you visit the link, it goes to a video interview with the executive director of the HI exchange, who states, when asked "do we know how many signups there've been so far?" that "it's about 12,000; we were at 250 this time last year, so we've made a lot of progress."
Now, hold the phone a minute. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, Hawaii only has around 53,000 residents total who are even eligible to enroll via the ACA exchange to begin with.
Wow...HUGE data dump today! First California (well...half of it, anyway); then HC.gov (37 states); now, of course, Massachusetts' daily snapshot.
Another 4,725 QHP determinations. Assuming 60% of those have selected plans already, that should bring the total to around 42,100 to date...or 33% higher than MA's total 2014 enrollment tally.
Meanwhile, they've also hit 68.1K Medicaid enrollees.
OK, this definitely makes me feel better about the confusing CoveredCA data release less than an hour ago, in which the data was so spotty it made figuring out how close I was next to impossible.
So, let's think about this. "Almost 1 million" suggests at least 900,000 people to me, and the "more" part makes it clear that he's referring to new enrollments, NOT renewals of existing ones.
The most recent official data point given was HHS's announcement of 765,135 plan selections as of 11/28 via HealthCare.Gov. They also announced that 48% of those were new enrollees, or around 367,000 people in the first 2 weeks of open enrollment.
Just moments ago, CoveredCA head Peter Lee held a conference call in which he issued the first full 2015 open enrollment period data (until now, the only number released was 11,357 QHPs in the first 4 days...except that only included new enrollees, not renewals).
As I noted yesterday, I estimated appx. 397K QHPs through Monday (12/08). I'm also guessing it'll be about a 55/45 split between renewals of existing enrollees & new additions.
The actual number of NEW QHP enrollments turns out to be: From 11/15 - 12/03: 130K determined elgiible, of whom 48,950 have selected plans...
Hmmm. Well, now...on the surface, this makes it look like I was way off, overestimating by a whopping 8-fold factor.
HOWEVER, there are two rather important (and unexpected) points which make that comparison impossible:
Ah, here we go...the 2nd official update from Kynect (Kentucky's Obamacare exchange, for certain U.S. Senators who can't seem to admit that little detail).
15,140 QHPs in 24 days is around 631 per day...or about a 50% higher daily average so far than they had in 2014 (and that included the December and March Surges).
Meanwhile, they've also added an additional 10,017 people to Medicaid. They don't specify whether all of those are brand new (the vast majority of KY's Medicaid-eligible folks should already be enrolled by now) or if some of them are renewals by existing enrollees, however:
