HC.gov Week 10 Snapshot just 74K; officially dropping my projection to 13.8 - 14.2M

As I said a few hours ago:

With all that in mind, if the Week 10 HC.gov Snapshot comes in anywhere under 200,000 today, I'll be dropping my final estimate to a range between 13.8 - 14.2 million.

Well, the Week 10 Snapshot was just released, and sure enough, it was pretty anemic:

Yeah, that's not great. In fact, this is almost identical to the number of new enrollees during Christmas Week (just over 74,000), making this the second lowest week of the Period.

So...yes, it's time for me to make it official: Unless the Final Week Surge (and yes, there will almost certainly be one) ends up being at least as massive as it was during Week Seven (1.8 million new enrollees)--which, to be clear, could still happen--I just don't see any way the final number will end up coming in much over 14 million.

Therefore, true to my word, I'm officially revising my end-of-OE3 projection to somewhere between 13.8 - 14.2 million. Note that this is with or without an "Overtime Period" tacked onto the end of March. So, there you have it.

74K via HC.gov likely means around 100K nationally, which means that the grand total as of January 9th came in at around 11.5 million after all (which I had already expected)...but yeah, I'm lopping around 700K off of my final projection.

At this point I'd say it's really all up to getting the word out about the increased Individual Shared Responsibility Mandate penalty. If the prospect of having to shell out anywhere from $700 - $2,400 apiece is enough to get people to sign up, fine, and I'll be very happy if the final tally ends up closer to my original projection. If not, however, things could be relatively quiet right up through the end of January. We'll know in 3 weeks.

Other than that, here's the state by state numbers...as well as something new this year: For the first time this year, CMS has broken down the QHP selection numbers in major metropolitian areas, which is of little interest to me (I stick with state & national), but is very handy for a lot of healthcare/economics wonks. You'll have to visit the CMS site itself for those, however.

Advertisement