UPDATED: STATE BY STATE: 19 states running ahead of projections; 16 running behind

Wed, 12/09/2015 - 7:00pm

I launched the "State by State" chart feature towards the end of the 2015 Open Enrollment period last time around, and it proved to be pretty popular, so I've brought it back this year.

It's important to note that I'm still missing data from some state exchanges; I have bupkis from DC, Idaho, Kentucky, New York and Vermont. I also only have partial data from others (California includes new enrollees only, while several other states only have data for the first couple of weeks).

In addition, there are three states (Connecticut, Rhode Island and Washington State) where I have the opposite situation--they've front-loaded their autorenewals of current enrollees, with the understanding that those folks can still drop their coverage or switch to a different policy between now and December 15th (CT) or December 23rd (RI & WA).

Update 12/10/15: Massachusetts just released their latest enrollment update, and it's a huge one! 180K, well ABOVE 100% of my projections for the end of open enrollment! Of course, like the other three states above, MA is including auto-renewals, but this is still extremely good news.

With all those caveats out of the way, here's where things stand. Just like last year:

The BLUE LINES represent the percentage of QHP selections each state had achieved as of 12/05 for most states compared to my best guess at their reasonable proportion of the 12.6 million people the HHS Dept. expects to select plans nationally. In some cases (California, Colorado, Connecticut, Idaho, Maryland, Minnesota and Vermont), I've used the official target number for that state, according to the exchange itself. For other states, I took a proportionate number based on the HHS Dept's 12.6 million total.

The GREEN LINES, meanwhile, represent MY personal projection of how many people I expect to select QHPs during open enrollment this year. Again, with the exception of CA, CO, CT, ID, MD, MN & VT, none of these targets are official.

Finally, I've included a vertical RED LINE. This represents the point I think each state should have been as of December 5th (around 3.79 million, or 26% of the 14.7 million total I'm projecting nationally by January 31st).

Obviously some are higher, others lower. Again, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Washington State are kind of misleading on the high end due to front-loading, while CA, DC, ID, KY, MA, MN, NY and VT are all misleading on the low end due to having missing data or none whatsoever yet.

Got all that?

Update 12/09/15: It turns out Minnesota updated their numbers today as well; everything below has been updated with their new data.

As you can see, 5 weeks in, 19 states are running ahead of my projections:

Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Hawaii, Iowa, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Wisconsin and Wyoming

As noted above, 3 states (Connecticut, Rhode Island and Washington State) can't really be compared properly until after their respective January enrollment deadlines pass and autorenewals are "locked in". Massachusetts would normally belong here as well, but they're already at 109%...unless they have massive cancellation numbers, it's safe to say they're well over the top.

The following 5 states are running dead even with my expectations so far:

Alaska, Kansas, Montana, Pennsylvania and Virginia

Meanwhile, 16 states are running behind projections so far:

Arkansas, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, Texas and West Virginia.

The other 10 states are either missing data completely or the data is too incomplete to be measured fairly yet.

I'm not going to go into a lot of individual state analysis until after the 12/15 deadline when autorenewals have been added into the mix, since it could simply be that residents of some states are more willing to allow themselves to be auto-renewed than others. Having said that, of the 41 states I have current data for, the only ones I'm at all concerned about so far are Illinois, Indiana, Mississippi and Texas, which are each running considerably behind where I expected them to be at this point. In addition, while Minnesota isn't running that far behind my 12/05 target, it's still worth noting because their data is as of 12/08. Since we're in the middle of "Surge Week", those 3 extra days are more critical than they would normally be.

On the positive side, there are 8 states which are substantially ahead of where I expected them to be: Hawaii, Nebraska, Nevada, Oregon, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah and Wyoming. Note, however, that three of these (HI, SD & WY) have very small populations, meaning that just a few thousand people can make a huge difference percentage-wise. Also noteworthy: All three of the former state-based exchanges (Hawaii, Nevada and Oregon) are substantially outperforming expectations. Whether this means anything, I have no idea.