Washington State: Effectuated QHPs down either 11.5% or...22%??

There's definitely some weirdness going on with some of the exchange enrollment reports.

Last night I noted that there's roughly a 17.3K gap between the number of people reported to have selected QHPs during the 2016 Open Enrollment Period according to the official ASPE report (213,883) and the number reported by the exchange itself (196,554).

Based on that discrepancy, the MA Health Connector has increased their enrollment by either a nominal 0.6% or an impressive 9.5%, depending on what you use as the starting number.

Well, this morning I've found a similar report for the Washington exchange, and this one makes even less sense to me because it not only contradicts the ASPE report, it seems to contradict the WA exchange itself.

According to the ASPE report, as of 1/31/16, 200,691 people had selected QHPs via the WA exchange. This is completely consistent with the exchange's own final report of "more than 200,000".

However, according to their March monthly enrollment dashboard report, the Washington HealthplanFinder only had 176,914 people having "Selected a Plan" as of February...and of those, only 156,493 were reported by the carriers as having paid.

That payment rate is a quite reasonable 88.5%, which is slightly lower than my general 90% rule of thumb estiamate nationally but not out of line at all. However, what's the deal with that 177K topline figure? Where did the remaining 23,777 people go?

Since all of these numbers supposedly apply as of either 1/31 or "February" (which I presume means either "effectuated as of 2/01 or no later than 2/29"), it's hard to show a trendline yet; I'd need March data for that. But assuming that 156,493 effectuated figure is correct, it means that regardless of the "true" end-of-OE3 number, the March 31 effectuation report will make it look as though Washington has already seen at least a 22% drop since 1/31/16.

I plan on contacting the exchange to try and sort this out, but in the meantime, here's the actual dashboard report: