3 gulps of PPACA exchange activity data

If the current level of reported PPACA exchange enrollment activity continued with no deadline-related surges, the exchange system might reach Feb. 15 with about 13 million people who had picked QHPs, including about 6.7 million people who had bought new coverage or changed coverage through HealthCare.gov; 2.3 million people who had bought or changed coverage through the enrollment systems of state-based exchanges; and about 4 million people who had been automatically re-enrolled into the same HHS exchange QHPs or state-based exchange QHPs they had been using in 2014.

Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analysts predicted a few years ago that the exchanges could have 13 million enrollees in 2015. HHS officials have estimated their plans might end 2015 with 9.9 million enrollees.

One possible piece of evidence for the idea that health insurers are happy with their public exchange operations at this point: Brian Wright, a securities analyst from Sterne Agee, raised his estimates on Aetna after hearing positive reports about the public exchange unit and other units at an investor event. Wright said Aetna is expecting public exchange enrollment to increase about 100,000 in the first quarter of 2015.

2. The 2015 enrollment figures could soar early next week, after HHS starts adding auto-renewals to its totals.

One figure that could throw off total 2015 exchange QHP enrollment projections is the behavior of people who had QHP coverage in 2014.

HHS is automatically moving most consumers who had QHP coverage in 2014 into the same or similar QHPs in 2015. HHS says it will start including the auto-reenrollees in QHP activity figures released after Monday. That adjustment could increase the HHS QHP selector total by about 6 million overnight.

States might use different approaches to reenrollment than the HHS exchanges, and some have used their own approach to breaking out figures for new selections of QHP coverage and renewal business.

Image: A banana slug. (National Park Service photo.) 

3. Some states have still not published much, or any, data.

At press time, the NY State of Health exchange had not released any enrollment figures.

State-based exchanges that had not released enrollment figures since Nov. 21 include Connecticut, the District of Columbia and Washington state.

But many of the state exchanges that have reported say they are doing much better than they were a year ago.

In Oregon, for example, technical problems kept the exchange from processing 2014 applications for months. This year, the exchange says it had processed QHP selection information for 7,200 people as of Nov. 30.

Managers of Covered California say their exchange received QHP selection information for about 49,000 people during the first 18 days of the enrollment period. Daily QHP selection volume is about three times higher than it was early in the enrollment period for 2014 coverage.

See also: Who had the toughest PPACA exchange competition?

Clarification: The original version of this article gave an unclear description of ACASignups.net’s QHP enrollment total. The total represents an estimate, based in part on confirmed QHP selection data and in part on extrapolations.