California: Covered CA reports 617K active enrollments, up 1.3% y/y so far...but a deeper look portends disaster for many...

via Covered California's Open Enrollment Dashboard, as of December 27th:

• New enrollments: 137,958
• Active renewals: 479,358
• Passive Autorenewals: 1,318,779
• Total: 1,936,095

As I've noted before: While I include the passive/auto-renewal number for completeness sake, that number won't really be relevant until after the deadline for January 1st coverage passes (which isn't until New Year's Eve in California).

More important for the moment is the total number of active enrollments, which includes both new enrollees as well as current enrollees who log into their account and actively select a plan for 2026.

In California, those come to 617,316 combined.

As of the same point last year (actually 1 day more; the data from last year is as of 12/28), Covered CA was reporting:

• New enrollments: 201,901
• Active renewals: 407,454
• Passive/Autorenewals: 1,286,203
• Total: 1,693,657

That's 609,355 new+active renewals as of 12/28/24, which means CA is technically running about 1.3% ahead of last year so far:

• New enrollments are down 32% y/y
• Active renewals are up 18% y/y

On the other hand, the official 2025 Open Enrollment Period enrollment tally ended up being 1,979,504 people, which means that total enrollment for 2026 is currently running about 2.2% behind last year.

On the surface, all of this may seem like good news: Enrollments are either up 1.3% or only down 2.2% at worst, right?

HOWEVER, if you look deeper, you can see the problem, which I've been warning about for some time now.

• First, notice that active enrollments (renewals + new enrollees) went from being up 4.8% on 11/29 to being up 4.0% on 12/06, up just 2.8% as of 12/20 and up only 1.3% as of 12/27.

• Next, notice that total enrollments dropped from 1,942,928 as of 12/20 to 1,939,528 a week later. It's only a nominal drop (less than 0.2%), but the point is that this means that more current enrollees are canceling than new enrollees.

• Finally, notice that there were still over 1.3 million current enrollees listed in the "Passive Autorenewal" category as of 12/27. This means that any of those who aren't logging into their account and actively selecting a policy for 2026 will be automatically renewed into their current policy...at whatever the new net premium for that policy is.

Now, the good news is that California is backfilling 100% of the lost federal tax credits for enrollees who earn less than 150% FPL. However, only around ~300,000 of CA's 1.9 million current ACA enrollees fall into that category.

Put another way: Around ~1.6 million CA enrollees are going to be hit with massive rate hikes in 2 days, and only ~600K of them are likely even aware of just how ugly it's gonna be. The other ~1.0 million are getting a very rude awakening right about now.

In terms of actual NET rate hikes, here's what it looks like so far according to the latest Covered CA data dashboard (again, the final numbers will look a bit different from these):

The ~266,000 enrollees who earn < 150% FPL are actually seeing a net reduction in their monthly premiums thanks to the state backfilling the lost federal tax credits.

However, the other ~1.5 MILLION enrollees are looking at average net premium hikes ranging from 8.8% for those who weren't receiving tax credits to begin with to a whopping 88% for ~120,000 enrollees in the 400 - 600% FPL income bracket.

Overall, net premiums are going up 35% for CoveredCA enrollees so far, and if you don't include the < 150% FPL category, they're going up an average of 46.6%.