Brainwrap: Week 12 Obamacare enrollments - including Medicaid Expansion - now exceeeds 5.2 million

[grantcart]

Pulling together numbers on Obamacare enrollments is a complicated business because of different sources and different methodologies and different definitions of 'enrollment'. Actual enrollment into an insurance plan doesn't happen until the first premium is paid and given that benefits wouldn't start until January 1st 2014 there is little incentive to pay before December 15th. The enrollment numbers of people who have completed all of the steps, including paying the first premium, won't be available until January and have to come from the insurance companies themselves.

The most consistent, careful and trustworthy compilation of people that have gone through the process and qualified for enrollment appears to be done by a blogger by the name of Brainwrap.

He/she has been posting a weekly update and has links to each states numbers.

It is possible that there is some duplication of numbers but it is certain that many of the numbers haven't been updated during the time when people going through the improved website has undergone significant increase in volume.

His latest numbers:

Private Enrollments 1,389,000

Medicaid Expansion/SCHIP 3,888,000

Total 5,277,000

His spreadsheet with links to his source material here:

http://obamacaresignups.net/

[Cha]

1. Brainwrap!

Thank Goodness on so many levels!

Mahalo grant~

[Brainwrap]

15. Thanks so much for the kind words!

[Cha]

16. Yes, grant turned us on to your site..

a few weeks ago or sooner.. Thank you, Brainwrap!

[politichew]

2. There's no going back now. nt

[4dsc]

3. Nice

Its working.folks.

[vinny9698]

4. GOP biggest fear

Even Ted Cruz said, once they get addicted to the sugar, it will be hard to get them off.

[stevenleser]

5. K&R & Bookmarked nt

[Ilsa]

6. Wasn't the goal around 7 million for

This first run? It looks like they are very close.

[JanT]

7. thank you brainwrap

i had the faith and it appears that it is working. that makes me very happy.

[TomCADem]

8. Given That Two Months Were Essentially Lost...

...and Republicans and the MSM have been relentlessly hammering the ACA with misinformation, I think that the number is pretty impressive. What is sad are the folks who clearly qualify for subsidies or Medicaid who are not looking into the ACA because they have drunk the Kool Aid being sold by Fox News.

[grantcart]

9. I believe that the goal of 7 million was for private enrollments and did not include the

Medicaid expansion.

That goal is for the period through March.

Even after March people can sign up but will face a penalty, but it is proportioned by month so if you sign up in April you would only be fined by 1/12 of 1 %.

I expect that March will be the heaviest sign up period and that a one month delay would not be a surprise.

I also think that there is a lot of advertising money that still has not been spent because they were waiting for the website to be worked out and also that the private insurers will be advertising themselves but wanted to wait until after Christmas to start advertising in their preferred markets.

[CreekDog]

10. it seems like December will finish with a sign up rate of 1.25 million per month

for private insurance.

at this new, higher rate, December ends with 1.5m signups, January with 2.75m, February 4.0m, March 5.25m.

of course, the rate won't stay the same, it will go up or down and vary, but if it were to continue at this rate, that would be very interesting.

[grantcart]

11. Not only that it is a multi year effort.

Mass now has less than 1% of its population that is uninsured.

The Republicans are faced with the fact that it is snowball effect that is going only in one direction, downhill.

Everyday more people have insurance than the day before. If they think people were skeptical about Obamacare just see how pissed they are going to be when you try to undo Obamacare and offer nothing in its place. The country would go batshit crazy.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/29/romneycare-had-super-slow-enrollment-the-white-house-says-obamacare-will-be-similar/

[CreekDog]

12. that is the race that is on

to get people signed up and to have millions to lose something valuable.

so that it is unlikely to be taken away.

the closest comparison i can come up with is the Catastrophic Health Care plan from the late 80's. they did end up repealing that but people for some reason didn't feel they were losing anything. i don't think that will be the case with this though.

[grantcart]

13. Yes of course but the real problem is that they need the best possible data

calculation for the 2015 premiums, so its not just about the number of people signing up but the quality of the risk spread. If it is only people who need it then premiums will have to be adjusted upward while if it is more inclusive then the premiums will be lower.

[CreekDog]

14. right, though the risk mix is really independent of the number of signups

if younger people are signing up in high enough proportions, that should help.

whereas if they meet the overall goal of 7 million, but the mix isn't what they want, that will need to be dealt with.

on the other hand, the young people that were on their parents' policies until age 26 are beginning to age out of that coverage and will be accustomed to having it, so they may be signing up.

also the idea that young people just blithely go without insurance doesn't sound right to me. some do, of course. but among my friends, it was always a big concern, there just weren't many options and there was underwriting to contend with, so if you got a policy it had huge holes in it and because you might get dropped, you feared using it. i had one of those policies from Kaiser, it was cheap but i was afraid to use it and i was lucky i had it.