Minnesota continues to kick major butt in spite of / due to indy market woes

Minnesota's ACA exchange, MNsure, continues to absolutely obliterate last year's open enrollment numbers during the first week:

The numbers as of Friday morning:

• 13,040 people completed enrollment for health coverage
• 187,683 visits to the MNsure website
• 43,298 sessions or visits on the comparison shopping tool
• 4,027 page views on the Assisters page
• 12,121 accounts created
• 13,701 applications completed

Assuming "Friday morning" means around 8am, that's 13,040 people actually enrolling in a healthcare policy in 3.3 days, or about 4,000 per day on average.

As I noted Thursday:

Last year, MNsure, Minnesota's technically (and actuarially) troubled ACA exchange enrolled "several hundred" people in Qualified Health Plans (QHPs) in the first day, and exactly 6,864 people in the first 17 days...which breaks out to an average of 404 per day for the first couple of weeks.

That's nearly a 10x increase in the rate of enrollments the first 3 days.

Again, there's a huge caveat/reason for this:

As a unique workaround to tide the precarious individual market over this year, MN is instituting a special rule: They're placing enrollment caps on 4 of the 5 participating insurance carriers. That means that it's a first-come, first-serve situation; anyone who misses the cut-off numbers for HealthPartners, Medica or Ucare will only have BluePlus to choose from (which has no cap...they're the HMO branch of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota).

Having said that, this is still excellent news given the circumstances.

The irony is that Minnesota is simultaneously the only state providing daily enrollment numbers for me to work with and the one state which I can't use to extrapolate any national numbers from. If every state was signing people up at 10x last year's rate, The Graph would be showing a projection of something like 8 million people the first week instead of 785,000. That's obviously not the case.