California: Final QHP selection total: 1.439M; 779K Medicaid

A couple of weeks back, CoveredCA reported that they had renewed 944,000 2014 QHP enrollees, and added another 474,000 new enrollees for 2015, for a grand total of around 1,418,000 private policy enrollees (payments pending, of course). Like every other state, CA tacked on an "overtime" period for people who were waiting "in line" by the 2/15 deadline but hadn't completed the process. I was assuming this might push their grand total up to perhaps 1.5 million or so.

Today, CoveredCA released their final official numbers, and they're...underwhelming:

Obamacare: @CoveredCA says newly enrolled 2015 was 495K, total enrollment including renewals is 1.41M #ACA

— Chad Terhune (@chadterhune) March 5, 2015

@charles_gaba yes, slight change. Renewal figure went from 944K to 913.3 as of 2-26

— Chad Terhune (@chadterhune) March 5, 2015

@charles_gaba the 495,073 newly enrolled as of Feb 22. 913,305 renewals as of Feb 26

— Chad Terhune (@chadterhune) March 5, 2015

In other words, California did manage to bump up their new enrollment tally by about 21,000 people...but they also revised their renewal total downward by about 30,700...which means that their official total ended up being just 1,408,378 in the end...or around 10,000 people lower than previously reported.

UPDATE: OK, strike that...sort of. Now that I've seen the actual executive board meeting presentation, I understand the confusion:

• On page 6, it reiterates 944K renewals from 2014
• On page 7, it specifies that 913,305 renewals from 2014 were enrolled as of February 26th.

In other words, the number of renewals from 2014 is down 30,700 people from the beginning of the year...but for the life of me I can't tell whehter this means that 913K are currently effectuated or just that, like Rhode Island, they've simply "purged" those who never paid their first premium by the deadline. Probabably a combination of both.

This actually makes sense; it basically subtracts some (not all) of the 12% expected not to pay their first premium, along with various others who presumably paid for the first month but then got a job with ESI or whatever. That is, normal churn. Confusing, though.

So, the true total QHP selection number is actually 944K + 495K = 1.439 million...about 21,000 higher than as of 2/15/15.

A bit better...but still nothing to get too thrilled about. This is a mere 2% increase over CA's 2014 total of 1,405,102 QHP selections.

The national grand total looks like it'll end up being around 11.75 million QHPs. If you want to know what accounted for the "missing" 750K from my 12.5 million projection, 260K of it can be found right here (remember, CoveredCA's own official target for 2015 was 1.7 million).

On the bright side, they've also added 779K new Medicaid enrollees (looks like this tweet is mistaken about the renewal number, though):

.@charles_gaba New #CoveredCA data today: 495,073 new enrollees thru Feb 22; 944,000 renewals. (Also 779,000 new enrollees in Medi-Cal).

— Health Access CA (@healthaccess) March 5, 2015

UPDATE: Also, further into the report is a hard-number update on the SHOP program; turns out the numbers are a bit lower there than I thought yesterday as well (a prior story had it down as 16,000 employees enrolled):

SMALL BUSINESS HEALTH OPTIONS PROGRAM (SHOP) UPDATE
As of February 1, 2015: • Total Number of Employers: 2,311 • Total Number of Members: 15,671

OK, so assuming 2.5 people per household/employee, that's more like 39K instead of 40K...but that was a rough estimate anyway, so I'm not gonna quibble about a 1,000 difference.