District of Columbia adds 535 QHPs, 15,704 Medicaid, 2,875 SHOP since April!

The DC exchange just issued a welcome-but-unexpected update; as usual, they do this weird thing where they're including the cumulative totals dating back to October 1, 2013, which is pretty much pointless (this would be like measuring how well Chrysler is doing in 2015 by counting every car they've sold since 1925).

Still, by simply measuring the difference between the numbers on different dates, it's easy enough to measure:

From October 1, 2013 to April 26, 2015, 106,364 people have enrolled in health insurance coverage through DC Health Link in private insurance or Medicaid:

 22,354 people enrolled in a private qualified health plan,
 67,761 people have been determined eligible for Medicaid, and
 16,249 people enrolled through the DC Health Link small business marketplace (includes Congressional enrollment)

Today's update:

From October 1, 2013 to June 7, 2015, 125,478 people have enrolled in health insurance coverage through DC Health Link in private insurance or Medicaid:

 22,889 people enrolled in a private qualified health plan,
 83,465 people have been determined eligible for Medicaid, and
 19,124 people enrolled through the DC Health Link small business marketplace (includes Congressional enrollment)

Subtract the former from the latter, and you get:

• 535 QHP selections from 4/27 - 6/07
• 15,704 Medicaid enrollees from 4/27 - 6/07
• 2,875 SHOP enrollees from 4/27 - 6/07

This is interesting for several reasons.

The private policy number is obviously very small (535 people), but that's still about 13 per day for DC vs. about 186 per day during Open Enrollment, or 7% of the daily rate. This matches up almost perfectly with my overall estimate of 7,500 people selecting QHPs per day during the off-season (during Open Enrollment, it was 116,880 per day nationally; 7,500 = 6.4%).

The additional Medicaid and SHOP enrollment numbers, however, are surprisingly high...especially SHOP, which has been generally anemic in most states; the only reason it's doing so well in DC is because of the requirement that Congressional staffers enroll using it. I find it hard to believe that over 2,800 extra Congressional staffers have popped up in the past 2 months, so I'm not sure what's going on there.

Anyway, there you have it. Bear in mind that due to lumping in 2014's numbers as well, out of those 22,889 QHP "enrollees", only 14,960 were actually enrolled in effectuated policies as of 3/31, although this has likely gone up slightly to perhaps 15,200 or so by now.