The graph below, with the line that curves up and to the right? It’s a sweet, sweet sight to the beleaguered bureaucrats and techies who’ve been frantically fixing HealthCare.gov since its disastrous October debut. It shows the cumulative enrollment in private health plans in the 36 states whose online insurance marketplaces are accessible only through the federal portal.
Enrollment figures for November made public this morning show that even though the site was still in intensive care for much of the month, it improved enough to sign up more than four times as many people in November (110,410 enrollments) as in October (a dismal 26,794). Given that the site has been “running smoothly for the vast majority of people,” to use the feds' catchphrase, only since the beginning of December, it’s likely that those numbers will take another leap upward in next month’s report.
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Enrollment in the 14 states running their own marketplaces continued to outpace HealthCare.gov’s totals in November. They added another 371,918 private plan enrollees, for a cumulative total of 227,478, with California and New York leading the way.
On the Medicaid side, the numbers tell a different and sadder story. All 14 states running their own marketplaces are expanding Medicaid to cover all low-income households, and to date they’ve qualified 534,103 people for Medicaid and the related Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) for low- and moderate-income kids. But the 36 states in the federal system, the majority of which are not expanding Medicaid, added only another 85,398 Medicaid and CHIP enrollees, many of them people who were already eligible for existing programs but didn’t know it until they applied for heath insurance.
Add it all up, and nationwide the marketplaces have supplied health coverage for 1.2 million Americans, about a quarter of the hoped-for total of 5 million new enrollees by the time open enrollment ends on March 31, 2014.
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Health reform countdown: We are doing an article a day on the new health care law until Jan. 1, 2014, when it takes full effect. (Read the previous posts in the series.) To get health insurance advice tailored to your situation, use our Health Law Helper, below.
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