217,176 (UPDATED)

Holy smokes.

From April Ryan, whose "HHS major scoop" batting average is now two out of three (at least since I started following her, anyway):

At 12:01 AM, White House Chief Technology Officer Todd Park acknowledged to QSSI, the Columbia, Maryland firm tasked with fixing Healthcare.gov that the ACA enrollments have surpassed the 7 million mark.

OK, that's pretty cool, but what's with the "holy smokes"? Well, when you listen to the audio clip of the countdown/7M announcement (and do so at the link...it's pretty cool), Todd Park states the following (emphasis mine):

"217,176. So, for everyone's benefit, that's the number of 834's that were generated from midnight to midnight...which is, by a humungous margin, the biggest number...ever. Now, what does this mean?

"...I'm proud to tell y'all, and you're the first to know, that y'all with this day alone, with the FFM alone, have carried the ball over the impossible line."

217,000 enrollees. In one day.

But wait, there's more: Take a look at the second bold-faced part: "with the FFM alone." The FFM stands for the Federally-facilitated Marketplace...aka, Healthcare.Gov. This makes sense, after all; the QSSI team he was speaking with didn't have anything to do with CoveredCA, NY State of Health or the other dozen or so state-run exchanges (these are officially called "State-based Marketplaces" or SBMs, by the way).

In other words, if I'm understanding him corectly, those 217,176 enrollees don't include the state exchanges

IF I'm interpreting Mr. Park's words correctly, he's saying that the grand total of exchange QHPs was brought over the 7 million mark even without including the state exchange enrollments for the day.

So, how many state exchange QHPs were there yesterday? I don't know, but I can take a guess.

The ratio of QHPs between HC.gov and the state exchanges has steadily moved in HC.gov's direction every 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

I'm assuming that this trend continued in March, with the Federal exchange making up perhaps 78% of the total enrollments. Assuming this held true yesterday specifically, that suggests that the combined state-based exchanges (California, New York, Connecticut, Kentucky, Washington State, etc.) enrolled somewhere around 61,000 additional people...and the total number of enrollments, yesterday alone, was around 278,000 people.

  • 217,176 / X = 78 / 100
  • 21,717,600 / X = 78
  • X = 278,430

Now, perhaps I'm misinterpreting Mr. Park's words, in which case I'll give an Emily Litella-style "never mind!" mea culpa.

Even if that's the case, however, 217K enrollments in a single 24-hour period is still nothing short of astonishing.

UPDATE: Well, I guess I should have checked with Ms. Ryan before doing the number-crunching above; according to her:

@charles_gaba I believe it is all from all sites

— AprilDRyan (@AprilDRyan) April 1, 2014

Hmmm...well, OK; that's still an absolutely jaw-dropping number (and it's actually more in line with what I was figuring last night anyway). Not sure what Park meant by the "with the FFM alone" bit, then, but whatever. Doesn't really matter.

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