What’s in the enrollment numbers that are starting to circulate:
Politico has good news and bad news:
Bad news:
40,000 to 50,000 people have enrolled in private health care plans using HealthCare.gov — a range far short of White House hopes, according to new numbers reported by the Wall Street Journal Monday.
That figure does not include people who signed up using state exchanges. Avalere Healthcare, a consulting firm, estimated Monday that about 49,000 people had successful enrolled in insurance in 12 of the 15 states running their own insurance exchange. The largest state exchange, California, has not released numbers.
This is bad news. The exchanges were projected to sign up and collect either checks or credit card information from half a million covered lives in this time span. The reporting is a bit unclear if there are roughly 90,000 to 100,000 covered lives or 100,000 contracts between the state and federal marketplaces. If it is 100,000 contracts that would be 200,000 or so covered lives as a rough guesstimate. The exchanges are behind pace. However, when compared to Massachusetts at a comparable period and then adjusting for the compressed time frame, the Exchanges are ahead of Massachusetts’s pace even with the techical problems. The question is will the fixes that have been going into play be good enough to deal with the highly probable surge of people who are looking for January 1st coverage right and want to buy right after Thanksgiving.
Good news:
Those figures don’t include enrollments in Medicaid, which have vastly outpaced the number of sign-ups in the marketplace in states like Kentucky and Washington, which have released early figures. A separate Avalere report on 10 of the states expanding Medicaid found that 444,000 have signed up for Medicaid.
This means people who need healthcare are getting it in some states in some situations. Ideally it would be an all-state statement, but fuck you Chief Justice Roberts et al.