The federal Health Insurance Marketplace signed up nearly 220,000 Georgians for health coverage after a last-minute enrollment surge in March, new state data show.
About 44,000 Georgians completed marketplace insurance applications in the last 15 days of March, nearly as many as in the entire month of January, the state Insurance Department reported Wednesday. The marketplace, which launched last fall, is a pillar of the Affordable Care Act and critical to its goal of extending health coverage to tens of millions of uninsured Americans.
“Given the opposition to having people covered in the state by state officials, the amount of misinformation, the lack of aid in finding these (health) plans and the terrible, terrible rollout of the website, this number looks pretty good,” said Bill Custer, a health insurance expert at Georgia State University.
In the coming months, insurance companies will be keeping a close eye on the claims these new customers are filing to determine how healthy or sick they are, which will affect premiums in 2015 and beyond, Custer said.
“2014 is very much a transition year — a new product on a new market with new technology,” he said. “We expect 2015 numbers to be quite different.”
Slightly less than half of Georgia consumers who signed up for plans during the six-month open enrollment have yet to make their first premium payments, required to ensure the coverage actually takes effect, according to the state. A majority will get federal tax credits to help make those premiums more affordable.
“We’ve got 222,000 applications for insurance but only 107,000 of those have actually paid,” Georgia Insurance Commissioner Ralph Hudgens said in an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution late Wednesday afternoon.
That number, however, is likely to rise, experts say.
With such a large number of people enrolling at the last minute, it makes sense that many may not have gotten around to making that first payment yet, Custer said. Indeed, they might have not even received an invoice from the insurer yet, Custer said.
Overall, about 150,000 Georgians are now covered by marketplace plans that have been paid for, according to the state.
That’s about a third of the 500,000 to 600,000 or so people who are eventually expected to sign up, and that number will likely continue to grow, Custer said.
Nationally, 7.5 million Americans signed up for private insurance through the marketplace — exceeding original projections. Another 3 million people enrolled in Medicaid, the government health program for the poor.
The numbers are remarkable given the dreadful launch of HealthCare.gov and its countless technical problems in October. The balky site stymied even the most determined website users, but sign-ups later soared nationwide after many of the glitches were fixed.
Federal health officials are expected to release state-by-state enrollment numbers in the coming days. But they have not yet reported how many of the new marketplace customers have started to pay their monthly premiums.
Hudgens said he questions the accuracy of the Obama administration’s latest enrollment data, given that it hasn’t yet put out any statistics on how many people have actually made payments on those health plans.
Nationwide, an estimated 20 to 25 percent of enrollees may not end up actually paying, Custer said. But the majority will.
More Americans are also expected to sign up for marketplace plans in the next couple of years as their old plans that don’t meet new Affordable Care Act benefit requirements expire.
Meanwhile, the numbers of initial enrollees are still expected to increase in the coming weeks.
That’s because consumers who had trouble signing up through HealthCare.gov by the March 31 deadline received a two-week grace period to finish enrolling.
The state data is encouraging but incomplete at this point, said Dante McKay, Georgia state director for Enroll America. Tens of thousands of uninsured or underinsured Georgians now have the peace of mind insurance coverage brings, McKay said.
The nonprofit, which reached out to 38,500 Georgians about the marketplace during open enrollment, plans to continue educating people about it.
“We look at this as a long-term deal,” he said. “It’s going to take a couple of enrollment cycles for people to catch on, for them to understand. I think this is a great start.”
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