One more Republican talking point against Obamacare—sure 8 million signed up, but
only two-thirds of them paid up—bites the dust. It looks like most of those people who signed up for health insurance in the first three months of the year—both on and off of the health exchanges created under the Affordable Care Act—are actually, officially enrolled. They've paid their first premiums. That's according to
new data compiled by the Kaiser Family Foundation using filings from insurance companies with insurance regulators.
This information isn't complete, but still shows that insurance coverage was 29 percent higher at the end of March than at the end of December.
What this new information shows is that, for individual market insurers with available data, the number of people with coverage in effect at the end of March was about 29 percent higher than at the end of December. (As there was a slight dip in December, comparing March enrollment to the end of September would yield a net increase of 26 percent). Roughly one fourth of this growth was from new plans, including new insurers and CO-OP plans as well as insurers that had previously operated in other markets or states. Overall, this suggests that the individual insurance market grew substantially during the first part of 2014, although many questions remain and we will need to wait for the next round of filings to get a more complete picture of overall enrollment, including capturing the late March enrollment surge.
This information is incomplete because several large insurers haven't yet filed because they either have different filing requirements or deadlines. The numbers also don't include the latest enrollees, including those in some states which extended the deadline for enrollment into April. The data only shows those whose coverage began by March 31, so doesn't include people who signed up after mid-February. Bottom line, there was a "net increase of roughly 3 to 3.5 million people for a total of about 15 million people in the individual market with coverage in effect by March, 2014."
Because of the huge surge in enrollments at the last minute, the Kaiser analysts say that new enrollments for 2014 "could conceivably double" by the time all the new enrollment data, both on and off the exchanges, is tallied up. All of which means Republicans are going to have an even harder time coming up with any kind of coherent response to Obamacare by November.