CoveredCA statistics (along with some random thoughts...)

Each week, CoveredCA puts out a website and call center activity report.  I thought it would be interesting to put together a consolidated table of their press releases.  Here's the table and my observations.  Key figures are in bold.

	Oct 1-5	Oct. 6-12	Oct 13-19	Oct 20-26	Oct27-Nov2
Unique visits to CoveredCA.com	986,705	602,539	486,678	543,300	511,552
Call volume	59,003	45,785	45,110	53,282	49,961
Average wait time	15:08	1:55	0:45	3:38	2:21
Average handling time	16:48	14:36	15:11	15:51	15:07
Applications Started	43,616	50,884*	31,429**	53,633***	47,440****
Partially completed	27,305
Applications completed with household eligibility determined	16,311
Number of Californians determined eligible for coverage	28,699
Small Business Health Options Program businesses registered as of 10/8/2013	430
		*2-week total in press release: 94,500
		**3-week total in press release:125,929
		***4-week total in press release: 179,562
		****5-week total in press release: 227,002

  The "Applications Started" number in each press release is the cumulative amount from October 1 to week end.  The number in the table is the difference between the numbers...the incremental growth each week.  You can probably knock 5-10% off the number to remove those who return and start over with a fresh app.

After the first week, no data was released for the number of applying households who passed both automatic and manual eligibility determination.   The number (16,311) mostly shows those that passed just the automatic eligibility tests...it was too soon for the manual process to have much of an effect.  It shows that 60% of those who partially complete an application go on to finish and clear the automatic validation process.  Assuming that 25-30% of the partially completed apps never get finished, the balance (10-15%) require some manual eligibility processing.  That's a lot of paperwork to handle and is liable to create long delays in enrollment processing.  

Assuming the (Applications Partially Completed):(Applications Started) ratio stays constant at 62% (27k/43k), and that 70% of the partially completed apps finish and clear the eligibility tests, I estimate that total enrollment for the five week period will be roughly 100K households (227K * 0.62 *0.7).  We'll see how close I am when the enrollment numbers are finally released.
 
The average household size of eligible households during the first week was 1.75 (29k/16k).  I suspect that this will remain pretty constant, so five week enrollment would be around 175K individuals.  Even accounting for a year-end bump when the procrastinators finally get moving, the 5 million enrollment target is going to be very hard to reach.  (And with a December 15 enrollment cut-off for Jan 1 coverage, a lot of those people are going to end up unhappily uninsured in January!) If CoveredCA expense budgets are built on a 5M enrollment, they're going to be in a world of hurt in a couple of months.   

The smaller than expected enrollment also means that ratio of sick people to healthy people is going to be very lopsided.  It's a given that the sick will sign up...the problem lies in getting the healthy to do so.  2014 premiums were based on a wish and a prayer.  I can hardly wait to see the 2015 premiums after six months of real claims factor in. 

The last week (or so) I've seen a lot of prime-time TV advertising for CoveredCA.  It'll be interesting to see how it translates into website and application activity over the next couple of weeks.  Heck, if it works for Cialis, it should work for CC...

I called CoveredCA yesterday on the Shop (aka small group)/Agent line.  67 people were ahead of me and I waited over an hour before my cell call was dropped.  I'm not sure how that maps to the 2:21 minute average wait time, but I'm obviously an outlier...or they're not staffing the employer/broker lines very well.  Luckily, there were only 55 people waiting when I called back.