STATE BY STATE: 9 states running ahead of projections; 10 running behind

I launched the "State by State" chart feature towards the end of the 2015 Open Enrollment period last time around, and it proved to be pretty popular, so I've brought it back this year.

It's important to note that I'm still missing data from some state exchanges; I have bupkis from DC, Idaho, Kentucky, New York and Vermont. I also only have partial data from others (California includes new enrollees only, while several other states only have data for the first couple of weeks).

In addition, there are three states (Connecticut, Rhode Island and Washington State) where I have the opposite situation--they've front-loaded their autorenewals of current enrollees, with the understanding that those folks can still drop their coverage or switch to a different policy between now and December 15th (CT) or December 23rd (RI & WA).

With all those caveats out of the way, here's where things stand. Just like last year:

• The BLUE LINES represent the percentage of QHP selections each state had achieved as of 12/12 for most states compared to my best guess at their reasonable proportion of the 12.6 million people the HHS Dept. expects to select plans nationally. In some cases (California, Colorado, Connecticut, Idaho, Maryland, Minnesota and Vermont), I've used the official target number for that state, according to the exchange itself. For other states, I took a proportionate number based on the HHS Dept's 12.6 million total.

• The GREEN LINES, meanwhile, represent MY personal projection of how many people I expect to select QHPs during open enrollment this year. Again, with the exception of CA, CO, CT, ID, MD, MN & VT, none of these targets are official.

• Finally, I've included a vertical RED LINE. This represents the point I think each state should have been as of December 12th (around 5.74 million, or 39% of the 14.7 million total I'm projecting nationally by January 31st).

Obviously some are higher, others lower. Again, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Washington State are kind of misleading on the high end due to front-loading, while others are misleading on the low end due to having missing data or none whatsoever yet.

Got all that?

As you can see, 6 weeks in, 20 states are running within 5 points (high or low) of my projections.​

Not including the special cases, there are 9 states running at least 5 points ahead of where I expected them to be as of December 12th:

• South Dakota, Hawaii, Utah, Oregon, Wyoming, Nevada, Tennessee, Nebraska, North Carolina

Meanwhile, 10 states are running at least 5 points behind where I expected them to be:

• Mississippi, Indiana, Texas, Illinois, New Mexico, Arkansas, Ohio, Georgia, Minnesota, New Jersey

As noted above, 4 states (Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Washington State) can't really be compared properly until after their respective January enrollment deadlines pass and autorenewals are "locked in", while the remaining 8 states (California, Colorado, DC, Idaho, Kentucky, Maryland, New York and Vermont) are either missing data entirely or have data which is too outdated to compare agianst the 12/12 standard.

(click the chart to load a full-sized version in a new browser window)