Obamacare has expanded health insurance to millions of Americans, and the latest enrollment data show that the individual and managed Medicaid markets have ballooned the most over the past year.
Carriers recorded the largest membership gains in the individual market, where enrollment grew 44% from the third quarter of 2013 to the third quarter of 2014, according to health insurance consulting firm Mark Farrah Associates. About 17.6 million people had individual health plans unaffiliated with employers as of Sept. 30, up 5.3 million from the same time in 2013.
The number of people in Medicaid managed-care plans rose almost 29% in the past year. That equaled 36.5 million people, or more than double the number of people in the individual market.
Those figures coincide with two of the biggest insurance provisions in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act: the creation of exchanges and Medicaid expansion. Millions of new consumers are on pace to buy individual health policies on the exchanges by the end of 2014's open enrollment on Feb. 15. And it's anticipated more states will expand Medicaid for poor residents this year and next, albeit in different forms crafted by Republican leaders.
The data from MFA also point to another trend in the age of Obamacare: More employers are turning to self-insurance, where they pay employee medical costs and outsource the claims administration to health insurers. That differs from fully insured health plans, where insurers handle everything. Self-insurance is viewed as an attractive insurance medium for employers because it is exempt from some regulations, including many in the ACA.
The number of people in employer-based, self-insured health plans increased 3.3% between the third quarter of 2013 and the same period in 2014, totaling more than 101 million members. The number of workers in employer-sponsored, fully insured plans dropped more than 10% to 54 million, according to MFA.
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