Follow-up: Strike that; over 40K enrolled today at HC.gov on 3/15; over 55.5K nationally (Update: 52.6k?)

Hat Tip To: 
J.D. (@rwhide), Ceth Eslick (@cetheslick)

Follow-up from last night's post on Saturday's HC.gov enrollment: The final number ended up being over 40,000:

Enrollment on March 15 at 2pm on the ACA website was 15,000 and counting.

UPDATED – As of 12:01 AM, March 16, 2014, Over 40,000 people signed up on healthcare.gov Saturday and made the deadline for insurance to be effective April 1, 2014.

UPDATED - As of 6:26 PM – Around 23,000 so far for today have enrolled for healthcare.  Almost 300,000 people logged into the healthcare.gov website today, Saturday, March 15, 2014.

Through Friday, I had the daily average for QHP enrollments at around 43,000 (up from the 33.7K/day in February).

Last night I assumed that the total HC.gov enrollments for Saturday (3/15) wold end up being around 32K based on the 6:30pm total of 23K.

However, it looks like the rate increased dramatically in the final 5.5 hours of the day (I forgot that was 6:30pm Eastern time...presumably folks in Central and Mountain added more to the numbers, along with Nevada and Alaska; California, Oregon, Washington and Hawaii all run their own exchanges).

So...40K at HC.gov...but again, that doesn't inlcude the state-run exchanges, which made up 28% of the total enrollments in February...meaning HC.gov made up 72% of the total. A little simple math gives us:

  • 40K / X = 72 / 100
  • 4M / X = 72
  • 4M / 72 = X
  • X = 55,555

So, assuming that the state exchanges operate at a similar ratio to the federal one as they did in February (which may not prove to be the case), the total for yesterday in particular should have been around 55,500 enrollments nationally.

One caveat: It's possible that this also includes Medicaid enrollments; Ms. Ryan didn't mention one way or the other. I suspect that this is QHPs only, however, which would make this a very good sign.

As a reminder, March's QHP enrollments will have to average over 59,000/day in order to hit the 6 million point. However, I have that average down as around 43,000/day for the first half of the month, which means it'll have to average around 75,000/day in the second half to average out to 59K.

UPDATE: Contributor Javier Anderson points out that the odds are that the 72/28 ratio between the Federal and State exchanges is likely not to hold steady in March. The ratio has been shifting in HC.gov's favor steadily since the disasterous October launch fo the Federal website; for the first 2 months, the state exchanges (well, most of them) had a huge leg up. Here's the ratios month to month:

October:

  • 79,391 State / 26,794 Fed / 106,185 Total
  • 74.8% State / 25.2% Federal

November:

  • 148,087 State / 110,410 Fed / 258,497 Total
  • 57.3% State / 42.7% Federal

December:

  • 729,513 State / 1,059,226 Fed / 1,788,739 Total
  • 40.8% State / 59.2% Federal

January:

  • 402,913 State / 743,158 Fed / 1,146,071 Total
  • 35.2% State / 64.8% Federal

February:

  • 261,335 State / 681,498 Fed / 942,833 Total
  • 27.7% State / 72.3% Federal

Based on this trend (17.5% shift, 16.5% shift, 5.6% shift, 7.5% shift), it's more likely that March's ratio will be more along the lines of a 23% / 76% ratio, which would make yesterday more like:

  • 40K / X = 76 / 100
  • 4M / X = 76
  • 4M / 76 = X
  • X = 52,632

However, that's a huge unknown. Perhaps the ratio shift has bottomed out. Perhaps the outreach efforts in California, New York and other state-run exchanges has ramped up more intensely than the HC.gov effort. However, props to Javier for pointing this out; he's probably correct that it's going to have shifted even more towards the Federal exchange to some degree.

 

Advertisement