Earlier this week Reuters claimed the big enrollment surge in December was continuing into 2014, much to the delight and relief of the White House. I looked at the numbers and, while it’s too soon to say for certain how January will work out, the evidence did not seem favorable to Reuter’s conclusion.
Today Jeryl Bier sent me a link to the latest numbers from Maryland and they seem to fall in line with some of the ones I looked at yesterday, i.e. enrollment is still happening but the pace is off a bit.
As of December 28, HHS reported that Maryland had seen 18, 272 private plan enrollments. That was a big jump from 3,758 at the end of November. So, Maryland saw 14,514 people enroll in December.
The new report from Maryland says “through January 11, 22,512 Marylanders have chosen to enroll in private health plans.” That works out to 4,240 additional enrollees in two weeks (since Dec. 28). If you extend that out to Jan. 31st you get 10,297 for the month. That’s great compared to October when nothing was working but it’s off 30 percent from the December tally (and that’s true despite counting the last 3 days of December as part of January’s total).
Yesterday I pointed out that Connecticut, which just released new enrollment figures also seemed to be off about 33 percent from December. It’s only two data points at this point but Connecticut and Maryland appear to be seeing similar levels of drop off this month.
A lot could change between now and the end of the month. Enrollment could surge with new advertising. Some states, like California, could see big gains that overwhelm the slack in smaller states like Maryland and Connecticut. That said, this is one more data point that suggests we may not see a repeat of December this month.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.