Cross-posted at ACA Signups
A triple-header for you this 4th of July weekend:
BRAVO to Washington State!
OLYMPIA, Wash. – Washington Healthplanfinder today announced a limited special enrollment period for Washington state residents whose same-sex domestic partnerships were recently converted to marriages on June 30. The 60-day enrollment window provides these couples with a unique opportunity to enroll in a Qualified Health Plan before the next open enrollment period that starts on Nov. 15, 2014 for coverage beginning in 2015.
A related article has the number of people impacted (3,600 couples, or about 7,200 people total):
Washington’s health benefit exchange is opening up a 60-day special enrollment period for couples in same-sex domestic partnerships that were recently converted to marriages.
On June 30, most state-registered domestic partnerships were converted to marriage automatically in Washington. This affected an estimated 3,600 gay and lesbian couples in the state.
Meanwhile, in Colorado...
As of the previous update (5/31), Colorado was averaging around 177 QHP enrollees per day in the post-open enrollment period (7,413 / 42 days). With this latest update (dated June 24), they've actually increased this average slightly (4,185 / 23 = 182/day), for an overall off-season average of 178 per day:
The number of new enrollees in private health insurance through the state exchange, Connect for Health Colorado, continues to inch upward by about a couple hundred a day — and now stands at 137,000, officials said Tuesday.
Although open enrollment officially ended March 31 with 118,000 signups, it unofficially ended at 124,000 in mid-April as people who started before the deadline finally finished the process.
This stability makes me more confident of my 9K - 12K/day off-season estimate, since the late April/early May enrollments might otherwsie have just been chalked up to unprocessed leftovers from the enrollment extension period. However, the rate
increasing (if only slightly) suggests that for Colorado, at least, the off-season rate seems to be pretty stable.
Finally, some very confusing--but extremely positive, if accurate--numbers out of Alabama:
This one is a bit squirrelly to suss out, and I'm not sure that I've done so correctly, so bear with me. According to the (very short) article:
MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — State officials say Alabama Medicaid's monthly enrollment has topped 1 million for the first time.
Officials said Thursday that a review of data for the first five months of the year show the milestone happened in February. Officials attribute the increase to a federally required transfer of children from the state's All Kids program and changes in how Medicaid eligibility is determined. Officials say the numbers also reflect the first enrollment of individuals who applied for coverage through the federal health exchange under the federal Affordable Care Act.
Enrollment has remained above 1 million in March, April and May.
OK, I took a look at the most recent CMS report, which includes the state-by-state enrollment numbers for Medicaid/CHIP as of September 2013, just before the ACA exchanges opened.
For Alabama, the number was right around 800,000. According to
preliminary data from the same report, AL's Medicaid/CHIP enrollment as of
April had actually gone
down by about 35,000.
However, according to the article above, actual enrollment has since been determined to be over 1,000,000 for 3 months straight. They seem pretty sure about this, so what's going on?
Well, the article also states that the main reason is because of a "federally required" transfer of kids from Alabama's "All Kids" program over to Medicaid...presumably CHIP, the children's version of Medicaid. However, according to the official All Kids website, "All Kids" is Alabama's CHIP program. So...I'm actually a bit confused here; it sounds like this is purely a program classification change more than anything else. According to KFF.org, Alabama had about 113,000 kids enrolled in CHIP (All Kids?), so that would explain about half of the 235K increase.
As for the remaining 122,000, the article above also specifies that these appear to be Woodworkers--people who already qualified for Medicaid even without ACA expansion, but only followed through with enrolling thanks to the streamlined process provided for by HC.gov (along with the massive outreach/awareness program that accompanied it).
I honestly don't know why the CMS report has the total number listed as only 765K in April; even with the "preliminary" caveat, that seems like a pretty big margin to be off by. However, the AP/WTVA article seems pretty damned confident about the "1M+ in March/April/May" statement, so it sounds like AL has indeed added 122K woodworkers.
Now, here's where things get really confusing: Also according to KFF.org, Alabama only had about 107,000 uninsured people eligible for Medicaid at all as of last October (since they didn't enact ACA expansion), which, if accurate, suggests that a minimum of 15,000 people fell on hard times in the state over the past 8 months or so.
If all of the numbers above are accurate, it sounds like Alabama has now enrolled pretty much everyone in Medicaid who is legally eligible to do so without expansion...but there are so many contradictory/confusing numbers being thrown around, I'm not positive about this.