As we like to say here inside the Beltway, its all about your baseline… So I am actually somewhat pleasantly surprised by the numbers HHS just released. I had very low expectations like everyone else. What seems encouraging to me is the level of interest – between the state and federal marketplace websites there have been 28 million unique visitors. There really aren’t that many reporters or health policy wonks in the world, even though it might feel that way, so that is a lot of people.
The headline so far is that 106,000 have chosen a plan – 75% through state exchanges. That sounds small as we expected, though HHS points out that Massachusetts only saw .3% of enrollees come in in the first month – and 106,000 is 1.5% of CBO projected enrollment in exchanges.
But dig a little deeper and there are some other interesting numbers.
Almost 1.5 million people have gone through the eligibility determination process in the state and federal marketplaces and of those 27% — or about 396,000 persons – have been determined eligible for Medicaid or CHIP. I’d love to know how many of those are children were already eligible and how many are newly eligible. For example, the state breakdowns show almost 25,000 persons determined eligible for Medicaid in Florida and Texas. Because those states’ parent eligibility is so low, I assume the vast majority of these 25,000 are kids – the welcome mat at work!
The Medicaid/CHIP count does not include folks who have come in through Medicaid/CHIP state agencies – so I am assuming that means that the successful strategies some states have undertaken to use existing program data to do outreach (see Arkansas blog) are not included in this number.
As I blogged about last week, we expected Medicaid enrollment to ramp up more quickly. Indeed as astute readers of SayAhh! know, Medicaid was projected to cover 9 million new people in 2014 – more than the exchanges. So Medicaid enrollment is off to a good start — which is great news for the health and financial security of those individuals and families who have been uninsured.
