MAJOR UPDATE x4: Here Comes the Boom! ACA up to either 900K (or possibly 1.3M)!!

NOTE: This was originally posted over at Daily Kos. I've since ported it over here for archival purposes.

Boy did I speak too soon. Earlier today I posted a diary stating that new enrollment figures for ACASignups.net have been a bit on the scarce side this week.

Literally moments after I posted the diary, WHAMMO:

If November had an Obamacare surge, consider this the December deluge. California averaged 15,000 daily enrollments early last week, about double the sign-ups the state had in early December. New York is now seeing about 4,500 residents choosing plans each day and, in Connecticut, the number is hovering around 1,400.

Now, please understand that I already knew about the 15K/day California enrollment figure a week ago. However, I don't use speculation on the ACA Signups spreadsheet; at the time, CoveredCA only stated 31,000 enrollments for 2 days in particular. I couldn't assume that the number would hold for the whole week.

Until today, when both the Washington Post and later, NBC (with a similar article that confirmed it for the full week) posted the numbers I've been expecting and craving.

Now, the wording of CoveredCA exec. director Peter Lee's "15K per day" statement didn't specify whether these are limited to private plans or not, but it was stated in the context of the 50K private enrollments CA had the previous week, so I'm comfortable listing them all under the Private column.

I'm not so sure about the "4,500/day" NY figure, however, so I've split it about 70/30 private/Medicaid since that's what they've been averaging so far.

In addition, the NBC article gives an update on Kentucky, bringing it to 92K total. Another article specifies 23,000 private enrollments, so that leaves 69K Medicaid/SCHIP.

As a result of all this and some other minor updates, the tally now stands at:

Private Enrollments: over 815,000

Medicaid/SCHIP expansion: close to 2.0 million

Total: 2.8 million and rising...FAST.

Bear in mind that this ONLY includes the past week's numbers for 8 states (and some of them are still a day or two behind).

So, the big question is, how many people will make the crucial 12/23 enrollment deadline in order to have coverage kick in on January 1st?

I'm gonna make a bold prediction and call it somewhere between 1.3 - 1.5 million private enrollments.

(I won't even try to predict the Medicaid/SCHIP number, since there's too many "mass enrollment" situations there).

Anyway, I would like to make a personal plea to everyone to start (if you haven't already) tweeting, facebooking and otherwise sharing the http://acasignups.net link with everyone you can. Make sure to use the following hashtags:

#acasignups

#obamacaresignups

#ACA

Thanks much! And as always, thanks to my crew of dKos assistants who've been providing most of the figures linked to in the spreadsheet.

Update: Just squeezed in one more small update, to Washington State, which is now up to either 32K or 93K, depending on your definition (WA is the only state to specifically define "enrolled" as having already made your first payment; every other state logically recognizes that if you buy a new car with a "$0 down" deal, it's still considered a sale as far as the dealer is concerned).

UPDATE x2: More numbers rolling in from Minnesota & Maryland, raising the new totals to over 860,000 private + 2.03 million Medicaid/SCHIP.

Also, the Minnesota numbers are extremely telling for another reason. Check out this passage from the linked article:

By Dec. 14, 11,805 people had signed up for private plans — more than twice the 4,478 private policies that had been purchased by the end of November. That's in addition to 27,150 people who signed up for the state's two public insurance plans through MNsure.

The agency estimates that in all, those sign-ups translate to 97,573 people who will be covered since many plans cover more than one family member.

This is one of the only articles that's specifically listed both the number of enrollments as well as the number of people covered by those enrollments, and it's showing nearly a 3x difference.

Unfortunately, almost none of the other dozens of stories linked to make such a distinction, and I have no idea which ones refer to actual people and which only refer to entire households, so I can't reflect that on the spreadsheet. However, it does suggest that some of the numbers could potentially be up to 2-3 times higher than what's listed.

Update x3: OK, you'll have to visit the actual spreadsheet to see the new graph, but I've updated it again and re-added a rough projection line. Based on it , my new 3/31/14 projection is for somewhere betwen 4 - 5 million private enrollments.

MAJOR UPDATE x4: Thanks to Buenaventura in the comments for leading me to this story from the Washington Post:

According to government figures, about 680,000 people had enrolled in plans through the federal insurance exchange as of earlier this week. That means that nearly 550,000 people signed up this month; figures released by the HHS show that about 137,000 people had chosen a health plan by the end of November.

The actual number is closer to 543,000 (680K - 137K), but thanks to this link, I've been able to fill in the rest of December!

I've lopped off a couple thousand more because about 2,500 of these were already accounted in the spreadsheet for Delaware, West Virginia & Wisconsin, but that still means that the "unspecified" December federal exchange figure has leapt from 112K to 540K in one shot!

Now, it's possible that this includes Medicaid as well. To play it safe, I'm breaking this 540K figure down 31% / 69% between Private Plans & Medicaid/SCHIP, since that's what the full HHS numbers for 10/1 - 11/30 broke out as.

Even with that, we've just broken through 900,000 private enrollments easily.

Meanwhile, I just emailed the journalist who wrote the WaPo story to ask for clarification.