At least 18 States have reached HHS Goal for 2015 with over 5 weeks to go

OK. The latest weekly snapshot released by the HHS Dept. an hour or so ago was about 25,000 enrollees higher than I figured, which is nice. However, the real news was that they included a state-level breakout of all 37 states, which is awesome!

I've plugged all 37 states into the spreadsheet, broken into 2 numbers: Total active renewals (ie, those who actively renewed or switched plans by the 12/15 deadline) and total autorenewals + new enrollments (unfortunately, I can't really break these out; I tried, but there are overlaps between the 12/15 ASPE report and the 12/19 weekly snapshot). In addition, the autorenewals are a "lump sum" instead of being broken out by state; I attempted to estimate based on the percent-of-total but came up with some states having negative figures, so obviously there are too many variables. That is, just because a particular state has, say, 2% of the active renewals doesn't mean they had 2% of the auto renewals, and so on.

Anyway, after plugging everything into the spreadsheet--along with the state-based exchange data--I can now see just where the HC.gov QHPs are...and the results are impressive and interesting in several ways:

  • At least 18 states (well, 17 + DC) have achieved 100% or more of the HHS's (admittedly lowballed) target (or in some cases, the state administration's publicly-stated target) for 2015 already. Note that this generally assumes 30% higher than last year's open enrollment total (ie, 10.4M nationally = 30% more than 8M):

Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Delaware, DC, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming

  • I say "at least" 18 because we still have zero renewal/re-enrollment data from California, New York or Hawaii, and even the new enrollee data is still as much as a month out of date in a few states.
  • Massachusetts, as always, is a special case. 30% higher than last spring would only be around 42,000; they're up well over 2x that already. However, a more realistic goal for them would be 175K or more given the unique nature of their situation.
  • None of these have officially reached my target (which is roughly 56% higher than 2014's open enrollment period), but many are very close (95% or higher)
  • Florida has enrolled nearly 1.2 million people already, which is an eyebrow-raiser; that's already 21% higher than last year's grand total (983K), and only 15% less than California's 2014 total (1.405M), even though CA's population is almost double FL's.
  • Texas, meanwhile, has about 860K, which is also excellent compared to last year--they're over 17% ahead already.
  • Of the HC.gov states, Michigan is, surprisingly (to me at least), bringing up the rear in terms of percentage expectations; it's in the low-80s versus the target.

UPDATE: I thought I explained this above, but it seems to be causing confusion, so I'll explain further here:

  • In most states (39 + DC), I'm going with 30% higher than last April's QHP total (that is, that state's percentage of the 8.02 million from last spring).
  • In the other 11 states (CA, CO, CT, FL, MA, MN, NJ, NM, NY, VT and WA), I'm using either a target from the state exchange or state government official (or a ballpark estimate, in the case of New Jersey). This is why Florida is above their official target even though they're "only" at 21% over last spring.
  • However, given the unofficial nature of the NJ target, I've removed them from the "bringing up the rear" comment above.

I should also note that at 7.82 million confirmed QHP selections to date, we're now at least 75% of the way towards the HHS Dept's target of 10.4 million by 2/15 (and likely almost 90% of the way there when you include the missing data from CA, NY, etc).

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