State-Level Enrollments as a Percent of Uninsured & Total Population

Yesterday I posted a table which shows how all 50 states (+DC) are currently ranking when judged by the original CMS projection numbers. It looks like this:

However, as I explained a few days earlier, the truth of the matter is that the state-level CMS projection numbers are, to put it kindly, not particularly useful, since for 40 states out of 50, the methodology involved in generating them is more than a bit curious. With that in mind, I've sorted the same enrollment figures against two other criteria: As a percentage of total unnsured people per state and as a percentage of the total population of each state. This gives us a very different picture:

When you change the order in either of these fashions, you get a very different picture. Instead of being scattered throughout the rankings, the state-run exchanges are now clearly clustered towards the top of the list, with Vermont, DC (thanks to those 10K or so Congressional staffers) and Washington taking the top spots in both cases. The 3 top states in the CMS version (CT, RI and NY) still rank near the top, but they're now trumped by VT, DC and WA.

What else can we see? Well, Kentucky, which fares poorly by the CMS standard in spite of being one of the smoothest-running state exchanges since Day 1, looks much better here--it's still not a top peformer, but runs in the top 40% in both charts. Likewise, beleaguered Oregon, with one of the worst-running exchanges, is actually doing pretty well when viewed in this manner, showing up 31st and 28th respectively. Conversely, Hawaii, which has a mediocre perfomance under CMS criteria, plummets down towards the bottom when viewed by total uninsured and is dead last when viewed by total state population.

Feel free to make of these charts what you will, and bear in mind that in alll 3 cases, the states with bold-faced states are ones which have been updated since the HHS report's 12/28 figures...which means that those 12 states have an unfair advantage over the other 38.