Connect for Health Colorado has announced that 153,383 folks signed up through the exchange for health care for the 2016 enrollment period, although the news came with little fanfare and no flourishes of rhetoric about how far they’ve come or how great they are, and zero explanation of what the numbers mean.
We did some digging and here’s what we came up with:
For the 2015 enrollment, 64,644 participants renewed their insurance through the exchange while 47,254 new customers came on board for a total of 111,898 participants.
That means an additional 41,485 customers during this enrollment, but not exactly the 82,000 who lost their coverage this year through the failed co-op.
And during the first open period from October 2013 through March 2014 127,000 folks signed up.
For the hundreds of millions of dollars spent by the health exchange for this grand Obamacare experiment, it doesn’t look like taxpayers have gotten a lot of bang for their buck. Especially considering that 400,000 Coloradans were identified in the individual market back in 2013 as potential customers.
There’s no official word as to how many Coloradans still don’t have health insurance. We think this would be a good question for state lawmakers to dig into, as well as the cost so far of the exchange and how much of that money actually helped a Coloradan pay for their insurance.