(Bloomberg) — As the clock ticks down to the end of open enrollment for individual public exchange "qualified health plans" (QHP), one thing is becoming clearer: What the final demographics will look like.
Demographics matter a lot because they will help determine whether the health insurance market goes into a death spiral (or requires hefty federal subsidies to keep it from doing so).
Young healthy people, and a lot of them, are needed to keep the market stable and premiums low. As we head into the final few weeks, we have a pretty good idea of how many young healthy people there will be, and the answer is: a whole lot fewer than the health-care wonks were expecting.
But wait a minute! I hear you cry. We don't know any such thing! After all, everyone expects a lot of young healthy people to wait until the last minute! Are you saying they're wrong?
Not exactly. I too expect the demographics of March enrollment to skew younger than prior months. But at this point, unless that enrollment is truly massive, I don't think that will be enough.
To see why, let's start with some basic numbers. As of March 1, 4,242,325 people had selected a plan on one of the exchanges; 1,075,990 of them, or just a smidge over 25 percent, were young adults ages 18 to 35 — that critical demographic that the exchanges need to enroll. Previous projections had been for 40 percent.
It's true that in Massachusetts, the young showed up relatively late to the party:
However, at this point, with one month to go, the youth contingent would have to be truly massive to get near the 38.5 percent that was originally projected.
Just how massive depends on the total number of signups in March. But to get some perspective, it's not even mathematically possible for youth signups to get to 40 percent of total signups unless we get at least 912,174 more people to sign up in March – - and then, it's only possible if every single one of those people, including covered family members, is between the ages of 18 to 35.
This is, if course, not likely. Thankfully, as the number of signups rises, the percentage of them that needs to be young adults falls. But even if we assume 3.5 million people sign up in March — theoretically possible, but not what anyone I'm aware of is projecting — 55 percent of them would have to be young to pull the demographics back in line.
