This post actually has almost nothing whatsoever to do with the Affordable Care Act itself.
Every year I dig through hundreds (thousands?) of insurance premium rate filings for carriers in every state. For the most part I ignore everything except for my core focus area, the Individual Market, although on occasion I also try to run analysis of the Small Group market filings as well. I don't really pay much attention to the Large Group market filings.
However, there's a bunch of other types of health/medical insurance as well, and one which I've written next to nothing about since I started the ACA Signups project is also one which is becoming increasingly important as the Baby Boomer generation retires: Long-Term Care insurance.
To illustrate my point, here are a few recent premium rate increase filings from carriers in Connecticut:
On another note, I also want to use this as an opportunity to point out that maintaining quality health insurance coverage needs to be a priority year in and year out. Jenks notes that "Pregnancies are often unplanned, making limited enrollment periods impractical for many women." But can't that be said of any medical condition? In fact, I would say pregnancy is one aspect of healthcare that's probably much more likely to actually be planned. While about half of pregnancies are planned, I doubt the same could be said for cancers, heart attacks, or car accidents.
In other words, while not all pregnancies are planned, overall it's a lot less "random" than most other expensive healthcare incidents.
Now that the 2018 Open Enrollment period is officially over in every state +DC, I've started compiling more detailed demographic breakouts of the data on a state-by-state basis. The official CMS report from the Assistant Secretary for Planning & Evaluation (ASPE) report should be released at some point in the next couple of weeks, but until then, I'll have to settle for whatever reports I can patch together from some of the state-based exchanges.
So far I've dug up final (or near final) data for six states: Colorado, Connecticut, Idaho, Maryland, Minnesota and Washington State. Collectively, these states only represent about 890,000 2018 exchange enrollees, or roughly 7.5% of the 11.8 million total, so I have no idea how representative they are nationally, but it's all I have to work with for the moment.
The type of demographic data available varies greatly from state to state, but a major data point available from all six of them also happens to be one of the more interesting points, especially this year, given the " CSR Silver Loading" gambit available in most states this year.
At this point, the only significant top-line 2018 Open Enrollment numbers missing are the final 10 days out of California (which could add perhaps 40,000 to the total) and a solid month of enrollment from the District of Columbia (23 days, actually, but they extended their deadline by 5 extra days, which may or may not be included in the final, official report from CMS). DC's tally through 1/08 was 21,352 QHP selections. Their all-time high was around 22,700 set in 2016, so I can't imagine that they added more than perhaps 2,000 more since 1/08. In other words, about 99.5% of the 2018 OEP QHP selections have likely been accounted for.
That means it's time to move on to...breaking down the demographic data! Woo-hoo! Parrrr-tyyyy!!
The big, official CMS report from the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) presumably won't be released for a couple of weeks, but some of the state-based exchanges are faster about posting their demographics. First up: Connecticut!
LT. GOV. WYMAN: DEMAND FOR HEALTH INSURANCE ROSE, 2018 OPEN ENROLLMENT STRONGER THAN PREVIOUS YEARS
(HARTFORD, Conn.) – Lt. Governor Nancy Wyman and Access Health CT (AHCT) CEO Jim Wadleigh today provided the results of the Connecticut healthcare exchange’s fifth open enrollment period, which ran from November 1 to December 22, 2017. During this open enrollment cycle, 114,134 residents signed up for private health insurance coverage, reflecting a 2.3 percent increase compared to enrollment figures last year.
Open enrollment on the state’s health care exchange, Access Health Connecticut, ends Friday at midnight.
Connecticut residents had one week longer to sign up for an insurance plan than customers of the federal site, healthcare.gov.
As of Thursday morning, some 106,000 people had signed up for health care plans through Access Health CT.
Exchange CEO Jim Wadleigh called this the most challenging open enrollment period in the five years it’s been up and running, citing uncertainty over the future of the health care law, mixed messages from the Trump administration, and the shortest enrollment period ever, at just seven weeks.
I'm assuming whoever posted the update simply forgot to also update the "as of" date; presumably it's as of yesterday (December 14th), but I've put in a request for clarification.
UPDATE: Yup, they've since corrected the date to read 12/15/17 (basically, as of this morning I presume).
It's important to note that today is not the deadline for Connecticut residents to enroll; AccessHealthCT's deadline isn't until next Friday, December 22nd.
This means they added 1,613 more people in the past week, but the pool of current enrollees dropped by 1,675, which means that at least a small number have actively cancelled their policies altogether. Looked at another way, the number of new enrollees has increased by 3,211 (from 11,749 to 14,960), which means that, again, a couple thousand current enrollees who either actively (or were passively) auto-renewed have since gone back into the system and changed their mind and cancelled their 2018 plans. This is normal, especially for the states which "front-load" auto-renewals before the December deadline passes.
They've also done something interesting: They're listing the 11,055 current enrollees who haven't actively re-enrolled as of yet. If every one of them did so (they won't), that would bring the grand total up to 101.4K.
