While the initial article looked at Oregon's poor showing at attracting the young adults considered crucial to health reform's success, it didn't look at other measures of success.
So how is the Oregon exchange -- with help from the Oregon Health Authority-- doing at enrolling people overall?
At Thursday's Cover Oregon board meeting, staff distributed to board members a ranking showing that Oregon does well at signing people up into private plans in two categories despite the exchange's information-technology problems. The vast majority of signups came through a joint state OHA-exchange multimillion-dollar backup plan of manual processing.
In total private plan enrollment, Oregon ranked 7th of the 14 states and Washington. D.C. who set up their own exchanges, and 27th in the country.
As a percentage of population, Oregon ranked 10th of the 15 state-based exchanges in private-plan enrollees and 30th in the country.
Meanwhile the national consulting firm Avalere Health has done its own projections for states based on uninsurance rates, incomes and other data. Of all states and D.C., Oregon ranks 26th, enrolling 58 percent of the potential private-plan enrollees, as determined by Avalere.
Kaiser Family Foundation has done its own ranking of private-plan enrollment as a portion of those eligible, and Oregon comes in 29th.
In reality, the reported enrollment numbers are almost certainly lower in reality. That's because the federal definition of enrollment counts people even if they have not paid their first-month's premium. It's unclear if Oregon's actual enrollment numbers are affected more than other states by this dynamic.
In Medicaid enrollment, Oregon does better, according to the Cover Oregon staff report—coming in at 6th in the nation as a percentage of population, and 10th in raw numbers.
Though critics inside the state say Cover Oregon's technology troubles have affected the state's Medicaid-funded Oregon Health Plan and may have skewed enrollment totals, though state officials don't think so. Separately, Cover Oregon communications director Amy Fauver said the enrollment numbers used for the ranking don't include the state's "fast-track" enrollment, which is responsible for another 130,000 sign-ups. They only include those enrolled through Cover Oregon, about 104,000 people.
©2014 The Oregonian (Portland, Ore.)
