UPDATED: STATE BY STATE: 31 states running ahead of projections, 20 running behind

Wed, 01/20/2016 - 5:49pm

UPDATE 1/21/16: Updated to include new data from Colorado, Maryland, Connecticut and California.

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.

Note that whle the enrollment numbers for most states below are current through January 16th, most of the state-based exchanges are either slightly more current or up to three weeks behind.

With that caveat out of the way:

The BLUE LINES represent the percentage of QHP selections each state had achieved as of January 16th 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 January 16th (around 12.0 million total, or 81.6% of the 14.7 million total I was originally projecting nationally by January 31st).

The Good News: There are 31 states running ahead of where I expected them to be by this point (ie, over 82% of my projection).

The states which continue to overperform the most are Massachusetts (54K ahead); Utah (33K ahead), Maryland (33K ahead); Tennessee (37K ahead); Oklahoma & Oregon (20K ahead each); and North Carolina (63K ahead).

The Bad News: The other 20 states are running behind where I expected them to be at this point (ie, under 82%).

While there are more states running ahead as behind at the moment, it's important to note that the "behind" column includes major states like Ohio (20K behind); Georgia, New Jersey & Indiana (30K behind each); Pennsylvania & Illinois (50K behind each); Florida (75K behind) and the big one: Texas, which is 235K behind where I was figuring it would be by now.

New York also may be running about 75K behind, but for a very specific reason: Their brand-new Basic Health Plan is "cannibalizing" more of the QHP enrollees than I had expected (which I should have). Kentucky is also behind (20K), but like New York, KY's data is over 2 weeks out of date anyway, so there's no way of knowing how much of this these states have picked up since then.

IMPORTANT ADDITION: Note that in addition to the 5,500 QHP selections which Rhode Island has "pre-purged" from their earlier numbers, this week HealthCare.Gov officially noted that they, too, have pre-purged over 246,000 QHP selections from the Week 11 Snapshot Report, along with an unknown number of earlier cancelled/purged enrollees (I'm guessing perhaps another 100K or so).

This means that if OE3 enrollments were being reported the same way that they were the past 2 years--which is what I assumed when I projected 14.7 million QHP selections total--the confirmed total as of today would actually be around 12.0 million instead of 11.6 million.