Fun w/Numbers: State exchanges shot up 60% in March/April. Federal exchange enrollments at least DOUBLED

So, now that I have the data through at least 3/31 (and in most cases, through mid-April) for all 15 state-run exchanges, I can start to play with the statistics a bit.

At the end of February (technically March 1st), the 15 state-run exchanges totalled 1,621,239 QHPs. As of 4/15, these add up to at least 2,564,005, or 58.1% higher. There's anywhere from 2-14 days missing from some of these, however (perhaps 30,000 total, for a total of around 2.59 million), so let's call it about a 60% increase since then.

However, we also know that the total exchnage QHP enrollment figure is a minimum of 7.5 million, and almost certainly closer to 7.9 - 8.1 million. Let's assume the low end: 7.9M total.

If that's the case, then subtracting 2.59M leaves about 5.31M on the Federal exchange, which runs the other 36 states. The Federal exchange total as of 3/01 was 2,621,086, so this means those 36 states collectively more than doubled their total enrollments in the past 6 weeks (2.026x, assuming 7.9M is the total).

Now, what does this mean for individual states?

Well, I have no idea whether this 2.02x factor is consistent from state to state on the HC.gov side. It's possible that some states went up 2.5x while others only went up 50% or whatever.

However, assuming a fairly even distribution, that would give the following for the 10 largest states (not including CA or NY, of course, since we already know their numbers):

  • Texas: was 295K on 3/01; this would bring them up to 598K
  • Florida: was 442K on 3/01; this would bring them up to 896K
  • Illinois: was 114K on 3/01; this would bring them up to 230K
  • Pennsylvania: was 160K on 3/01; this would bring them up to 323K
  • Ohio: was 79K on 3/01; this would bring them up to 160K
  • Georgia: was 139K on 3/01; this would bring them up to 281K
  • Michigan: was 145K on 3/01; this would bring them up to 293K
  • North Carolina: was 201K on 3/01; this would bring them up to 406K

Georgia gives a good test case. Yesterday they released their data through 3/31, which showed the QHP tally as around 222K. This was already a 59% increase over 3/01, so going up another 59K during the 2-week extension period seems reasonable.

Texas would only be at 63% of their "fair share" of enrollments if they "only" doubled to 598K; this would also make that Baker Institute study meaningless if true.

On the other hand, again, it's entirely possible that Texas tripled their total, while some of the other states "only" went up by 50% or less.

Hope we find out soon...

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