Friends,

On Thursday, May 1, the Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS) released the most comprehensive analysis to-date of health coverage enrollments made through the new health insurance marketplaces between October 1, 2013, and March 31, 2014 (you can CLICK HERE to view the full report).  The data also includes enrollments made via special election periods through April 19, 2014.

Here are some of the key takeaways from the report:

• 8,019,763 people selected marketplace plans from October 1, 2013, through April 19. 
• Nearly 2.6 million signed up via state-based exchanges and there were over 5.4 million plan selections via the federally facilitated and partnership marketplaces.
• About 3.8 million people were procrastinators and enrolled between March 2 and April 19.
• Of the more than 8 million:
  • 54 percent are female and 46 percent are male;
  • 34 percent are under the age of 35;
  • 28 percent are between the ages of 18 and 34;
  • 65 percent selected a Silver plan
  • 20 percent selected a Bronze plan; and,
  • 85 percent were eligible for a premium tax credit
• Being a red state or a blue state didn't really matter. More than a third of the sign-ups came from three states with large numbers of uninsured residents. Bright blue California had 1.4 million people sign up and fire-truck red Florida and Texas brought in 980,000 and 730,000 sign ups respectively. The next closest states were New York and North Carolina, which each signed up more than 350,000 residents.
• The states that enrolled the smallest percentage of their uninsured populations were purple Iowa, red South Dakota and blue Massachusetts.
• The report contains the first glimpse of the demographics of the newly signed-up population. About 63 percent were white, compared to 17 percent African American, 11 percent Latino and 8 percent Asian.

The report also shed some light on the question of how many of the 8 million were previously uninsured and how many of them were just switching to new exchange-based individual coverage. The report extrapolated data to predict about 5.18 million people who applied for exchange-based coverage were getting coverage for the first time. This number is based on data showing that only 13 percent of new enrollees told the federal exchange that they had coverage at the time of the application. However, even HHS officials cautioned that the sample used to make this calculation was small, the data is "not very reliable" and people may have under reported their coverage. Data for all the state exchanges wasn't available.

One key piece of data not contained in the report - how many people enrolled in private qualified health plans have paid their first premiums. Obviously, this is the final step to truly being covered. Industry trends suggest that 85 percent will pay and 15 percent will not, and that an additional number will drop their coverage or simply will stop paying premiums at some point during the coverage year. How many new exchange enrollees will ultimately drop-off of their coverage plans is right now an unknown, but a recent study shows that only about half of individual market purchasers pre-health reform remained in their individual policy for a year or more. Will this new 8 million people behave similarly? Only time will tell!