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October 10, 2014 at 12:18 PM
Oregon had no luck with getting its exchange enrollment system to work, but a survey team found that the state residents who managed to get covered seem to be reasonably healthy.
Bill Wright, a representative from the Center for Outcomes Research & Education at Providence Health & Services, gave that assessment in survey results included in a recent Cover Oregon board meeting packet.
The center mailed questionnaires to 9,945 exchange qualified health plan (QHP) users and received 2,114 responses. Wright noted that users of the survey results should recognize that the participants may not be completely representative of the people who bought QHPs through Oregon’s Cover Oregon exchange.
But the answers from the exchange QHP users who did return questionnaires may give some hints regarding how sick or healthy QHP users are overall.
In Iowa, for example, the insurance commissioner has suggested in rate decision comments that 2014 claims experience has been worse than insurers had originally expected.
An analyst at Express Scripts has published pharmacy program data suggesting that QHP enrollees were as likely as other health plan enrollees to use specialty drugs for many conditions, such as transplants or multiple sclerosis, but twice as likely to use specialty drugs for hepatitis C, and four times as likely to use specialty drugs for HIV.
