Fewer than half of Oregon’s 2015 share of federal insurance exchange consumers have re-enrolled as of Dec. 5, but that should not be any cause for alarm as many of them may have chosen to simply roll over their old plan to the new year.
Rollovers should happen today -- the last day for consumers to sign up for individual health and dental insurance on healthcare.gov and still get seemless coverage into January. If consumers had a plan -- and their health insurer continued that plan for 2016 -- the default option would be to keep that same plan, with premium adjustments, into the new year.
Because Oregon made the switch to the federal exchange from Cover Oregon just last year, this will be the first time consumers can sit on their laurels and stay in the system -- which nearly half of all consumers in other states did last time.
“Last year, a lot of people in other HealthCare.gov states chose to auto reenroll (2 million auto reenrolled vs. 2.2 million who actively reenrolled), so we’ll probably see a surge in enrollment when auto enrollment kicks in,” said Joel Metlen, the spokesman for the Oregon Health Insurance Marketplace, a division of the Department of Consumer & Business Services.
Marketplace employees have encouraged the roughly 107,000 consumers from last year to actively re-enroll on the exchange, which would allow them to shop around and consider competitors, particularly when faced with the sticker shock of a 25 percent rate hike on Moda Health plans or a 35 percent hike on LifeWise plans.
If people do re-enroll and regret the decision, they still have till Jan. 31 to pick a different plan, although their effective date will not start until February or March. Citizens who do not sign up for individual health insurance by the end of January and have no other health insurance will face a 2.5 percent tax on their 2016 incomes.
So far, 49,825 Oregon consumers have enrolled in a health plan on the exchange website, putting Oregon on par with most other states. Oregon is the 19th-largest state using the federal exchange, and it ranked 19th by policies sold, according to data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. No data was provided from the 12 states still using their own exchanges. Utah, with a million fewer people than Oregon, sold 4,000 more plans, but Indiana, which is 70 percent larger than Oregon, sold only 47,272 plans.
Nationally, CMS reported that the federal exchange attracted 1.8 million returning customers and 1 million new consumers. The figures do not show how many Oregon consumers are new or returning. More than 10.8 million people have created an account nationally while nearly 3.7 million people have used the site just to compare plans.
Metlen said that Oregon had 73,152 sign-ups by Dec. 15, 2014 -- but it was hard to do a direct year-to-year comparison. This year’s open enrollment began Nov. 1, but last year’s didn’t begin until Nov. 15. In both years, Dec. 15 has been the deadline to choose a plan that takes effect on Jan. 1, and the most recent data leave out the last 10 days for signing up -- which are likely to be the busiest time, as procrastinators rush toward the finish line.
