The February CMS Report is out! (UPDATED)

Unfortunately I don't have a link to the actual report yet; Politico just did one of their "Breaking News" things for now. Apparnetly it's slightly below 3M Medicaid/CHIP enrollments in February, for a total of 11.7M since October 1st. HOWEVER, not all of these are new (some are renewals), and others may be part of the "baseline churn" so it's not a simple matter of tacking on 3M to the total.

Watch this post for updates once I actually hunt down the PDF of the report itself...

Remember, this is for February, not March. The March CMS report probably won't be out until the first week of May, and possibly even later (I'm assuming it'll be even more of a PITA to compile, given the craziness at the end of March...)

Meanwhile, the HHS report for March, which is the one which will confirm/clarify the big 7.1M exchange QHP figure (along with the other half of the Medicaid data) should be out sometime next week...although again, it might be delayed due to the March rush.

UPDATE: OK, I have a copy of the report now!

I have to run out for lunch, but will be back in an hour or so and will start breaking it down. For the moment, however, here's the key findings:

CMS is announcing that in February, an estimated 3 million additional individuals were enrolled in Medicaid and CHIP compared to prior to open enrollment.  This announcement comes as part of the release of the fifth in a series of monthly reports on state Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) data, and represents state Medicaid and CHIP agencies’ eligibility activity for February 2014, which coincided with the fifth month of the Health Insurance Marketplace Open Enrollment.

It is important to note that the enrollment numbers reported today are underestimates of what the actual enrollment for February will ultimately be. There are several reasons for this:

• Not all states are reporting
• The data are preliminary, and do not include most individuals who will later be found eligible for Medicaid effective in February

Key findings from the Medicaid report:

• 3 million additional individuals enrolled in Medicaid or CHIP through the end of February 2014 compared to enrollment before the Health Insurance Marketplace opened on October 1, 2013.
• Among states that adopted the Medicaid coverage expansion and whose expansions were in effect in February, Medicaid and CHIP enrollment rose by 8.3 percent compared to the months prior to Marketplace open enrollment period.
• States that have not expanded Medicaid coverage reported an increase in Medicaid enrollment of 1.6 percent over the same period.
• Eligibility determinations also continued to grow:  between October 2013 and February 2014, 11.7 million people were determined eligible for Medicaid and CHIP by State agencies, up from 8.9 million reported last month for the October – January period.

OK, that's it for the moment. More soon...

UPDATE: OK, the Feb CMS report entry is a little on the long side, so I set up a separate entry for it...