Charles Gaba's blog

OK, now that the January numbers are out, let's take a look and see how the individual states are doing. The wonderful Kaiser Family Foundation has a much more sophisticated version of this, but my spreadsheet has two features theirs doesn't: Ugly color-coded cells...and more recent enrollment data for 13 states.

While including post-February 1st data fro some states but not for others does give a bit of an unfair advantage to those states, it's still worth taking a look at to see how the states are faring.

First, let's use the official CMS Projection percentages. These absurdness of these numbers has already been discussed repeatedly, so I won't rehash that here, but we should at least check it out before looking at a more rational measurement.

SEE UPDATE BELOW!!

OK, the anti-ACA talking point of "How many enrollees have actually PAID???" has been one of the most commonly-made attacks on the exchanges since the first decent numbers started rolling in at the end of November. It seemed awfully silly back then, since at the time, the actual coverage start date was still weeks away. Most people I know don't pay their utility or credit card bills until just before they're due, so it seems disingenuous to assume that a health insurance policy (which could be up to $1,000+ per month for some families) would be any different.

Here's what I said about the issue on January 2nd, right after the first wave of policies kicked into effect:

Less than 8 hours after the HHS Dept. released their big January enrollment report, Nevada has already issued another update to their numbers: 

Update as of 2/8: 23,686 consumers have confirmed Qualified Health Plan selections, 16,030 have paid.

The 16,030 number is a 7% bump over a week earlier (14,999), and the unpaid number (7,656) is slightly higher than the prior week (7,598).

With all the focus on fixing the problems with the individual/group healthcare exchanges, there's been far less attention paid to the more-troubled SHOP (Small Business) exchanges. The administration had already announced that the HC.gov version (covering 34 states*) wouldn't be launched at all until this fall, and 2 of the state-run exchanges (Oregon and Maryland) recently announced that they'd be offline until well after the end of the March enrollment period as well.

Today, Covered California announced that while their SHOP exchange has been operational (with a small number of enrollments to date), they're shutting it down until this fall as well. This leaves 14.5 state-run SHOP exchanges in operation (and yes, that's 14.5, not 15...Washington State's SHOP is only running in 2 counties at the moment).

Still, the press release does give a slight bump in CA's SHOP enrollment before they stop taking new signups: 4,490 individuals covered, plus another 1,200 being processed, for a total of 5,690. That's where it'll stay through the end of the March enrollment period unless they reverse themselves between now and then.

OK, given how messy and confusing the Medicaid/CHIP situation is, I had to think through the best way to incorporate the January HHS Report into the mix. The problem is that not only are the monthly HHS reports only part of the equation (the January CMS report probably won't be released for another 10 days or so, based on prior months), but it's not a simple "add HHS now, then add CMS later". The two actually intermingle, and some of the caveats and overlapping data changes from month to month, which means that some of the data I include today will have to be modified or removed after the CMS report is released, and some of the data which I've removed will have to be added back in...or part of it will, anyway.

Having said all that, I think I have a pretty good grip on how to do this now:

OK, I've scrambled and have updated the Private QHP spreadsheet with the January HHS Report figures.

While the official number as of 02/01 is just shy of 3.3 million, my spreadsheet includes partial updates since February 1st for several states. As a result, the actual current total is at least 3.43 million in all:

• 3,149,008 from the 46 states which haven't been separated out between Paid and Unpaid enrollees
• 169,382 known to be paid enrollments from NV, RI, VT, WA & WI

This adds up to 3,318,390, which is the number that I'm counting towards the "Percent of CBO Projection" total...which I'm now calling 46.9% as of today.

• Then, there's another 119,164 known to be unpaid enrollments from NV, RI, VT, WA & WI

Add these all up and you get a total of 3,437,554.

Add in the 124,220 known Off-Exchange Private QHP enrollments and the 54,814 known SHOP enrollments, and you have a grand total of 3,616,588.

Add in the 3,101,000 known "sub-26ers" and this goes up to about 6.71 million people on the Private QHP side.

ACASignups.net, 5 days ago:

I'm calling the January HHS Exchange-Based Private QHP Total an even 3.3 Million even as of 2/1/14.

CNBC, moments ago:

A total of 3,299,492 had enrolled in Obamacare plans as of Feb. 1, according to HHS.

Damn. I was off by 0.017%. :)

OK, this is gonna take a bit of time to absorb and recompile to the spreadsheets, graph and the blog, but here's the main points:

• 3.3 million Private QHPs as of 02/01/14, as I expected
• 1.9 million via the Federal exhange (HC.gov)
• 1.4 million via the 15 State exchange (14 states + DC)
• 25% between 18 - 34 years old
•  

Here's the official HHS Dept. Press Release and a direct link to the actual January Enrollment Report:

Until now, aside from the official monthly HHS reports, Vermont's enrollment data has been frustrating--not that it hasn't been available, it's just been released in confusing dollops (Massachusetts falls into the same category). Today, however, the Vermont Health Connect exchange released a detailed PDF that does a great job of answering the key questions--along with one bit of data I haven't seen for any other state so far: The breakdown not only of total Private QHP enrollments, but how many of these started in January, February and (upcoming) March.

Page 6 has the key data: A total of 16,906 QHP enrollees as of 2/10, of whom 13,514 are paid up. Overall, this points to an 80% paid rate, which is very good--but the monthly breakout is even more interesting: January-start enrollees have a 92% paid rate (which you'd certainly hope for by now, considering that we're into mid-February) and February-start enrollees are at 79% paid. The March-start enrollees (14%) are the ones providing the main drag on the total...but this is hardly shocking since the start date for that coverage is still over 2 weeks away.

Minnesota's Private QHP enrollments went up a smidge from 28,611 to 29,493 the first week of February, while Medicaid enrollments increased from 61,784 to 63,005 (Medical Assistance + MinnesotaCare combined). Pretty weak tea, I have to admit.

Just received this bit of negative news out of Wisconsin...apparently half of the WI Private QHP enrollees through the end of December still haven't made their first payments yet:

MADISON (WKOW) -- Wisconsin Deputy Insurance Commissioner Dan Schwartzer says only about half of the 40,752 state residents that signed up for health insurance through the Affordable Care Act have paid their premiums and are currently receiving coverage.

Schwartzer tells 27 News that while some of the state insurance companies participating in the federal marketplace have received premium payments for 65 to 70 percent of those policies, others have seen a payment rate of only about 15 percent.

Between the Avalere reconfiguration, the Washington State double-counting news and this discouraging item out of Wisconsin, this isn't a particularly cheery day for ACASignups.net, I admit.