Kentucky: Net attrition? What Net attrition? Current QHP enrollments even or UP since April

Yesterday I posted a whole slew of state-level QHP attrition rates, comparing the number of people currently enrolled in private exchange-based healthcare policies against the official number from back in April.

The numbers ranged from as poor as Florida losing 12% of their enrollments in just 2 months to as well as Maryland and Oregon seeing a 30%+ net increase in enrollees over the past 6 months.

Today I can add Kentucky to the latter list. She couldn't provide an exact current count, but according to the woman I spoke with at the kynect exchange (that's "Obamacare", Mitch!), the number of Kentuckians currently enrolled in private policies via kynect is "right around the same number it was at last spring, between 80-85 thousand".

Well, the official number for Kentucky as of 4/19/14 was 82,747. Of course, not everyone paid up. She also confirmed that in Kentucky, it was "between 85 - 90%" who paid (which is right in line with my 88% national average estimate). Assuming 88%, that would be about 72,800 of those who enrolled through April paid up.

The "80-85K" certainly makes it sound like she means that this is how many are currently enrolled (which would mean around 82,000 currently a 12% increase over last spring). While it's conceivable that she meant that the current number is around 73K (12% less), it sure didn't sound that way to me; she definitely said "80 - 85K".

She was also able to provide me with some other interesting tidbits for the upcoming 2nd Open Enrollment (OE2) period:

  • While there were 5 insurance companies operating on the exchange in 2014, only 3 of them were for the individual market. The other two (Bluegrass & UHC) are for the state's SHOP exchange only.
  • There are, however, 2 new companies joining the individual exchange for 2015: CareSource and WellCare.
  • In terms of the exchange website, unlike other states like Maryland, Massachusetts, Vermont etc, kynect didn't really need any major technical fixes, but they are making the "true price" (including tax credits) much more prominent, and are adding the ability for people to search for a broker/agent/navigator in their community via the kynect website this year.
  • Most of the kynect improvements for 2015 are more on the outreach/education/customer service side, with a near doubling of the number of certified agents, more call center phone lines/representatives and so forth. The agents/navigators were a huge help in KY last year.