Wahoo, the December 2014 Healthcare.gov monthly enrollment report has been released and wonks across the nation are diving into it right now.
The biggest take-away is things are working.
The second most notable thing to me is the shift in plans being purchased.
If we rebucket the five bands into three categories, where Catastrophic and Bronze go into the low bucket, Silver goes into the medium bucket, and Gold plus Platinum go to the high bucket, what we see is a stable Low bucket at the start of this open enrollment period when compared to the end of March last year, a 20% drop in the High bucket that flows directly to the Medium bucket.
I can not say if the shift is due to people dropping acturial value in search of better premiums once they figured out that they were over-insured last year, if people who bought Gold or Platinum last year on the Exchange figured out that they would qualify for medium (87% AV) or high (94% AV) cost sharing assistance Silver, or if the case mixture changed. My bet is a little of all three. The risk pool is a bit younger in the initial part of the 2015 open enrollment period, so there should be an age weight that leans to lower acturial value coverage.
More Silver and other nuggets from the December 2014 enrollment reportPost + Comments (8)