I'm not sure how this press release slipped by me (it was posted quietly on Nov. 11th), but my eyebrows immediately shot up when I read the first bullet point...only to turn into eyerolls when I read the second one:
PROVIDENCE – HealthSource RI (HSRI) has released certain enrollment, demographic and volume data through Saturday, November 7, 2015, for Open Enrollment.
INDIVIDUAL/FAMILY ENROLLMENT As of November 7, 2015:
30,680 individuals are enrolled in 2016 coverage through HSRI, paid and unpaid.
Nearly all of these individuals are current HSRI enrollees that have been auto-renewed into a 2016 plan.
306 individuals have selected a plan for 2016 coverage and are new to HSRI this year or returning after being enrolled with HSRI at some point during a prior year.
I was out of town over the weekend, visiting Alabama for my niece's Bat Mitzvah; then, when we got back it turned out our broadband connection had gone out (I'm currently at the library while waiting for the AT&T guy to show up).
In any event, a lot of big news happened over the past few days. The biggest non-healthcare-related stories, of course, were the horrific ISIS attacks in both Beirut (over 40 killed, over 200 wounded) and Paris (over 120 killed, over 300 wounded). My deepest sympathies to the people of Lebanon and France.
Alabama's Republican governor says he is considering expanding Medicaid under ObamaCare in his state.
"We are looking at that,” Gov. Robert Bentley said Thursday, according to The Associated Press. “We have not made a final decision on that yet, exactly how that would work.”
Bentley indicated that expanding Medicaid, the government health insurance program for the poor, could help get more doctors into rural parts of the state.
"I am concerned about the plight of the working poor,” he said. “If doctors are not paid for seeing those patients, doctors will not go to rural Alabama, because you can't expect a doctor to go to rural Alabama and lose money.”
The Republicans in two dozen states thought they were playing smart politics (with people's lives, but screw them, right?) when they denied Medicaid expansion, but this has since blown up in their faces, and has now become a potent issue for Democrats in several GOP-held states. I think I know why they thought this...and why it didn't work out the way they figured.
As far as I can tell, the Republican mindset was this: Poor people don't vote. Therefore, screwing over poor people = brownie points from the GOP base without any potential downside.
However, I think they forgot something important: Regular Medicaid might only apply to poor people, but the Medicaid expansion provided for by the ACA applies to many lower-middle class people...and they do vote (at least in greater numbers than the "dirt poor" anyway).
Of the 543,000 people who submitted applications and chose plans, 34% were new customers and 66% were re-enrolling, CMS said. Nearly 1.2 million people submitted applications for coverage.
Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell called the numbers a "solid start." But she warned that It’s difficult to directly compare this year to last year's start of open enrollment as it started on Nov. 15 last year.
"We know from past experience that people are deadline driven, so we don’t expect to see deadline effects for a few weeks," she said.
Massachusetts' #OE3 enrollment numbers have to be handled a little carefully. Unlike most exchanges which mainly report the number of Qualified Health Plan (QHP) selections (ie, placed in cart & checked out), the Massachusetts Health Connector is very careful to specify how many of those are actually entered into the system and have paid their first monthly premium.
More than 57,000 people enrolled in health coverage through MarylandHealthConnection.gov during the first nine days of 2016 open enrollment, more than double the enrollment traffic during a comparable span a year ago.
Of the 57,213 who enrolled from Nov. 1 through Nov. 9, 10,867 were in private qualified health plans; 45,402 were in Medicaid and 944 were in stand-alone dental plans. The large Medicaid total included previous Medicaid enrollees who were in Maryland's former legacy system and were "redetermined" into the new web-based system.
Assuming roughly a 25% QHP selection increase this year (at least, that's what I'm assuming), that would translate into around 750K nationally, 570K of which would be via HealthCare.Gov, but I'll be a little cautious and drop it back to at least 720,000 QHPs in Week One nationally, 550,000 via HealthCare.Gov.
November 12, 2015
By: Sylvia Mathews Burwell, HHS Secretary
In the first week of the third Open Enrollment, more than 540,000 people selected a health insurance plan through the HealthCare.gov platform and more than 1.15 million consumers were included on applications submitted to the Marketplace. Even more signed up through their State-based Marketplaces.
[assuming that everyone currently enrolled sticks with their current policy next year], no matter how I slice it, the national weighted average increase for 2016 seems to be somewhere between 12% - 13%.
My attempt to boil down the overall, weighted-by-market-share, national average 2016 individual market rate increases into a single percentage figure has received a lot of attention over the past few weeks, including not one but two citations from Paul Krugman of the New York Times, feature articles from Bloomberg News and the Huffington Post, and even a partly-mangled version from the right-wing Daily Caller.
I'm not name-dropping for the heck of it here; my point is that I've been a little jumpy about that particular projection (12-13% overall) getting so much attention because I honestly had no clue how accurate it was.
