ST. PAUL, Minn.—Today, MNsure announced more than 100,000 Minnesotans have enrolled in comprehensive, affordable health insurance coverage since November 15, the start of the 2015 open enrollment period.
Don't get me wrong, this is certainly good news. The only caveat is that this includes not just QHPs, but Medicaid ("Medical Assistance") as well as the special "MinnesotaCare" program, which is sort of a public/private hybrid healthcare program unique to Minnesota. I've never been quite sure how to categorize MNCare, but it's not counted as a QHP so I have it plugged into the Medicaid spreadsheet.
To date, MNsure has enrolled 43,730 in a Qualified Health Plan, 16,583 in MinnesotaCare and 40,441 in Medical Assistance, for a total enrollment of 100,754.
Hmmm...that's just 269 more people with QHPs than they reported last Friday. Granted, it was a) a weekend; b) a holiday weekend and c) the first few days immediately after the February-start deadline (ie, the slowest portion of the open enrollment period), but that's still a bit on the low side. For comparison, from January 1st - January 15th, MNsure averaged 240 per day; this was 269 over a 5-day period. Hopefully things will start ramping up again as we approach the (presumed) mid-February surge.
Meanwhile, they've also added another 2,563 to Medicaid/MNCare over that same period.