HC.gov Week Eight Projection: 100K new, 150K final auto-renewals (?), 8.50M cumulative

Tue, 12/22/2015 - 3:12pm

Yeesh, what a mess.

As I expected, the Week Seven numbers were a bit confusing due to a) the deadline surge; b) the 2-day extension of the deadline and especially c) the auto-renewal factor. While "the vast majority" of auto-renewals (2.28 million of them) were already added to the Week Seven total, CMS says that there are still "some" auto-renewals yet to be added. I wasn't expecting them to spill auto-renewals over into the following week, so things are kind of messy this week.

In addition, while these won't impact the federal exchange numbers, several state-based exchanges (Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, Rhode Island and Washington State) have/had January deadlines later than the 12/17 one on the federal exchange and some other states, so there's a lot of bumpy numbers going into Week Eight.

With that in mind, I'm effectively calling Week Eight a "do-over": I was assuming the HC.gov total would hit around 8.50 million last week, with another 100,000 or so new enrollees tacked on this week. Instead, I'm assuming the same 100K new additions...but am also assuming that a remaining 150,000 auto-renewals will be added into the mix.

UPDATE: OK, based on my analysis from this post, there could theoretically still be up to 690,000 auto-renewals left to add to HC.gov alone...but that sounds awfully large to me given the "vast majority already added" wording of the press release, which is why I'm going with a far more cautious 150K. Obviously I'll be happy to be wrong on the low side.