VERY interesting news out of Oregon. On the one hand, the gross QHP enrollment figure, which had been cut in half from 300/day down to 156/day is back up to over 200/day, right in line with the rebounds from Hawaii and Minnesota!
On the other hand, unlike last week when the net enrollment figure dropped from 280/day down to a measely 10 in an entire week, the number today is actually lower than it was a week ago!
July 14 NET enrollments: 82,637; July 21 NET enrollments: 82,183...a drop of 454 people.
July 21, 2014
Update: Private coverage and Oregon Health Plan enrollment through Cover Oregon
Medical enrollments through Cover Oregon: 322,707 Total private medical insurance enrollments through Cover Oregon 1: 95,115 Oregon Health Plan enrollments through Cover Oregon: 227,592
Hmmm...OK, first it was Hawaii with the QHP total actually going down from 6/28 through 7/05. Then Minnesota reported a huge drop-off in their off-season enrollment rate, from about 52 per day from April through the end of June to just 2 per day for the first 13 days of July.
Now we have Oregon's latest update. While the total QHP figure has grown by 1,092 over the past week, the paid QHP number has only gone up by...10. That's right: Just 10 in the past week, or just over 1 person per day...down from over 300 per day in the off season until now.
(As an aside, new Medicaid enrollments are also slowing down, with just another 290 people being added to the program).
Oregon continues to rack up impressive QHP numbers, although their daily average is definitely slowing down as we move farther from their "extended-extension period". Even so, their net enrollments are still up another 1,258 since 6/24, while Medicaid enrollment has gone up just 1,221. My suspicion for the Medicaid enrollment drop-off (also noted by contributor deaconblues) is that they've simply run out of Medicaid-eligible people in the state...which makes sense seeing how they've added 355K people to the program since January (227K via the exchange + another 128K via their "fast track" program), when the Kaiser Family Foundation estimated that there were only 260,000 uninsured people even eligible for Medicaid to begin with!
There's a TON of amazing news out of Oregon today, but I only had room for the most stunning one in the title above. Trust me, this is chock full 'o goodness:
For all the hits Oregon has taken over their website, they continue to calmly, quietly, manually add more and more people to their exchange rolls:
Medical enrollments through Cover Oregon: 315,825
Total private medical insurance enrollments through Cover Oregon 1: 89,744
Oregon Health Plan enrollments through Cover Oregon: 226,081
Net private medical: 81,369
Net private dental: 15,461
This is a net increase of another 1,029 QHPs and another 14,151 Medicaid enrollees since June 12...or up 21,436 QHPs since the end of Open Enrollment on 4/19 (330 per day on average).
It's worth remembering that Oregon started the year with only about 559,000 uninsured people in the entire state. Add in the 128,434 "Fast Track" Medicaid enrollees and you have a whopping 444,000 people covered one way or the other.
OK, it's difficult to get a bead on how Oregon has been performing since the end of open enrollment, because they bumped theirs out 2 weeks beyond most other states. Even so, they've added 19,214 additional QHP enrollees since the 4/19 HHS report, or over 350 per day.
Interestingly, there's been no change at all in their reported Medicaid enrollment; I'm assuming they just didn't include that data this week since it's changed some every other time.
June 12, 2014
Update: Private coverage and Oregon Health Plan enrollment through Cover Oregon
Medical enrollments through Cover Oregon: 299,452 Total private medical insurance enrollments through Cover Oregon: 87,522 Oregon Health Plan enrollments through Cover Oregon: 211,930
Dental enrollments
Total private dental insurance enrollments through Cover Oregon 1: 17,751
Net enrollments Net private medical: 80,340
Net private dental: 15,574
Officials in Idaho say they’re undaunted by the well-documented failures of Obamacare exchanges in neighboring states and are moving full-steam ahead with plans to launch their own web portal this November.
While executives at Cover Oregon and Nevada Health Link abandon their state-run websites and turn to the federal exchange (HealthCare.gov), Your Health Idaho is headed in the opposite direction.
The state relied on the federal website for the open-enrollment period that ended in mid-April because it had less than 200 days last year set up its own web-exchange when state lawmakers authorized the project. It was one of two states — New Mexico is the other — that had to wait a year for its own site, and exchange officials say the delay has been a plus as they meet with other states to discuss what went right or wrong during Obamacare’s first round.
It's rather ironic that Oregon, which had a disastrous exchange website which it's abandoning in order to join the federal exchange, still continues to post their enrollment data on a regular basis (pretty impressive numbers at that, by the way--another 10,204 added to Medicaid in the past week or so), while the federal exchange, which has been running smoothly for months now, has decided to stop posting their own updates. In any event...
Medical enrollments through Cover Oregon: 297,712
Total private medical insurance enrollments through Cover Oregon 1: 85,782
Oregon Health Plan enrollments through Cover Oregon: 211,930
Dental enrollments
Total private dental insurance enrollments through CoverOregon 1: 17,578
Net enrollments Net private medical: 78,970
Net private dental: 15,476
A big shout-out to Nick Budnick of The Oregonian, who has been all over Cover Oregon's horribly-troubled-but-surprisingly-successful healthcare exchange from the get-go. He just released a big new story which features an extensive breakdown of Oregon's overall individual insurance market, including both on-exchange QHPs, off-exchange QHPs, grandfathered noncompliant plans and even the "small group" ESI market, among other things. Thankfully, all of these numbers are broken out so I'm able to make sense of them.
They may have flushed a couple hundred million dollars down the drain on their website, but that just makes Oregon's manual QHP processing achievement all the more impressive. Over 6 weeks after the official enrollment period ended, and over 2 weeks after their extension period wrapped up, Oregon continues to push their QHP and Medicaid enrollment totals up:
Medical enrollments through Cover Oregon: 280,334 Total private medical insurance enrollments through Cover Oregon 1: 81,358
Oregon Health Plan enrollments through Cover Oregon: 198,976
In spite of their several-hundred-million-dollar meltdown of a website, Oregon has managed to pull off an impressive feat: Between private QHPs, standard Medicaid/CHIP and their "fast track" program (not included below), they've enrolled nearly 400,000 people in healthcare plans of one sort or another via the ACA.
May 8, 2014
Update: Private coverage and Oregon Health Plan enrollment through Cover Oregon
Medical enrollments through Cover Oregon: 271,180 Total private medical insurance enrollments through Cover Oregon 1: 77,583
Oregon Health Plan enrollments through Cover Oregon: 193,597
Total private dental insurance enrollments through CoverOregon 1: 15,926
Net enrollments Net private medical: 72,890
Net private dental: 14,602
