January 10th was the last time that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) issued a detailed 2022 Open Enrollment Snapshot report which broke out 2022 ACA enrollment across every state.
As of 1/10/22, it had already reached an all-time record of nearly 14.9 million people (13.8 million via Qualified Health Plans, or QHPs, and another million or so who have enrolled in Basic Health Plans (BHPs) in Minnesota and New York specifically).
A few days later, CMS issued another update just ahead of the official January 15th OEP deadline (in most states) which updated the top line QHP tally to over 14.2 million. They broke this out by "over 10 million" enrollees on the federal exchange (HealthCare.Gov), plus another 4.2 million or more in the 18 states which operate their own ACA exchanges.
Tack on the 1.0M BHPs and that's at least 15.2 million nationally.
On Monday morning, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) reported that total 2022 ACA Open Enrollment had reached an all-time high of 13.8 mllion people selecting Qualified Health Plans (QHPs) via the federal & state-based ACA exchanges. In addition, over a million more Americans had enrolled in the ACA's "Basic Health Plan" (BHP) programs in Minnesota & New York. Combined, this means that the 2022 ACA Open Enrollment Period (OEP) had enrolled nearly 14.9 million people as of late December.
In my blog post/analysis about this report, I concluded:
The big question now is how many more new enrollees will be added by January 15th (final deadline in 44 states), January 23rd (Massachusetts) or January 31st (CA, DC, NJ, NY & RI)? (Idaho is the only state which had their final deadline for 2022 Open Enrollment back in December).
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) reports that 13.8 million Americans have signed up for or were automatically re-enrolled in 2022 individual market health insurance coverage through the Marketplaces since the start of the 2022 Marketplace Open Enrollment Period (OEP) on November 1. This includes 9.7 million plan selections in the 33 states using the HealthCare.gov for the 2022 plan year, through December 15, 2021, the deadline for January 1 coverage.
That would put the national final QHP total at somewhere between 12.9 - 13.2 million people nationally as of January 31st, 2022; call it around 13.1 million.
...I completely forgot to mention BASIC HEALTH PLAN (BHP) enrollment in New York and Minnesota. It totalled 975,337 people during the 2021 OEP (883,451 in New York, 91,886 in Minnesota)...I'm willing to bet total BHP enrollment across both states will end up perhaps 10% higher year over year, which would put it at around 1.1 million.
When you add that to my QHP projection above, you get a grand total of perhaps 14.1 million QHPs + BHPs combined.
If this projection had proven accurate, it would have meant total ACA exchange enrollment was up ~9 - 10% year over year, which would have been impressive but not stellar.
Now that we have two weeks worth of 2022 Open Enrollment data under our belt (well...for 33 states, anyway), I thought this would be a good time for me to try and put together a spitball estimate of how many Americans are likely to enroll in ACA exchange coverage during the 2022 Open Enrollment Period (OEP).
There's really two main numbers to try and project: How many current enrollees will renew/re-enroll for 2022 (whether actively or automatically); and how many new enrollees will jump into the ACA exchanges?
For each of these, due to how the data is reported, I have to further break the states out between those using the federal ACA exchange (HealthCare.Gov) and those which operate their own state-based ACA exchanges (Covered California, NY State of Health, etc.) This is further complicated by the fact that three states (Kentucky, Maine and New Mexico) switched from the federal exchange to their own state-based exchange starting with the 2022 OEP.
Normally this would be a big, wonky, in-depth analysis, but I'm gonna keep it relatively basic this year for two reasons: First, because the final numbers are only slightly different from what I had them at already (seriously, I was only off by around 5,300 enrollees out of over 11.4 million total); second, because with the COVID-19 pandemic having killed well over 5,000 Americans already with no end in sight, I'm not sure anyone really gives a crap at the moment.
