HC.gov Week Six Snapshot: 1.33M weekly; 4.17M cumulative (overshot by 4%)

Some Guy, 12/09/15:

I'm sticking to my guns for Week 6, projecting an even 1.5 million QHP selections via HealthCare.Gov, bringing the grand total to 4.34 million as of 12/12.

REMEMBER, as always, that this only includes the 38 states included on the federal exchange; when you throw in the other 13 running their own exchanges, the grand total by the 12th should be roughly 5.76 million QHPs nationally.

OK, I got a bit ahead of myself this week:

More than 1.3 million consumers signed-up for health coverage through the HealthCare.gov platform between December 6 and December 12, the last full week before the deadline for January 1 coverage, bringing the total number of plan selections made since Open Enrollment began on November 1 to 4.17 million consumers.  Approximately 500,000 were new consumers, for a cumulative total of about 1.5 million new consumers since the beginning of Open Enrollment.

Ah, nuts; I overshot by 13% for the week, and therefore overshot by about 4% cumulatively. Crud.

Still, given last yesterday's "unprecedented" website traffic and the 2-day deadline extension, I suspect the folks at HC.gov aren't too upset this week.

OK, so what else does this week bring? Well, as noted in the press release, they've now broken 1.5 million NEW enrollees via the federal exchange, which likely means around 2 million nationally.

Also note that there were 2 million more applications on hand (6.15 million) than actual QHP selections (4.17 million) as of Saturday the 12th, which bodes well for enrollments this week (again, "unprecedented traffic").

Also worth noting: With three days to go before the (official) January enrollment deadline...

• December 12, 2014: 2.47 million QHPs total
• December 12, 2015: 4.17 million QHPs total (69% more plans selected)

Obviously the two week head start this year prevents this from being a strict apples-to-apples comparison, but still impressive. As for new enrollees:

• December 12, 2014: 1.17 million new QHPs
• December 12, 2015: 1.50 million new QHPs (28% more new plans selected)

Assuming these ratios are representative of the state-based exchanges as well, the grand total as of 12/12 was likely around 5.5 million (3.5 million renewals + 2.0 million new additions). My own projections assume 9.0 million current enrollees re-enrolling nationally plus another 5.7 million new additions by the end of January, for what it's worth.

Again, all of this could easily be thrown out the window this week due to both the massive deadline spike/extension as well as the bulk addition of auto-renewals.

At the state level, here's where things stand across the 38 states covered by the federal exchange; I'll post a separate state-level analysis later this afternoon: