Update x3: ACA Enrollments hit 150,000; Major ObamacareSignups.net Changes

Fri, 11/15/2013 - 11:48am

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

As many of you know, I've been tracking ACA applications (including Medicaid enrollments) since the beginning of October, helped by a dozen or so fellow Kossacks.

I've posted frequent updates here.

The reason I was including both applications as well as actual enrollments is because most of the reports didn't bother to distinguish between the two. Plus, the actual number of completed applications do serve a legitimate purpose as well (for instance, we know that as of 11/02 there were an additional 900,000 applications in the hopper, ready for plan selection).

However, with the release of the official enrollment numbers for the first 33 days (10/1 - 11/2), it seems a bit pointless to continue with the applications as well. Therefore, I'm making a major change to the spreadsheet.

Going forward, whenever possible I'm going to only be listing actual enrollments for each state. In this sense, my numbers will more closely parallel EnrollMaven.com, an openly anti-ACA website that's also been tracking Obamacare signups.

I was highly skeptical of EnrollMaven for the first few weeks, especially since their definition of an enrollment didn't appear to include Platinum Exchange plans, for some reason. However, a few days ago they corrected this (and frankly, I never understood how they could possibly know which type of plans people were enrolling for anyway) and their methodology otherwise seems to be sound. In addition, they've at least been completely frank about their negative opinion of the ACA, and many of my sources have turned out to be identical to theirs, so I've grown pretty comfortable with using them as a cross-check on my own numbers.

However, there's still a few important differences between their site and ObamacareSignups.net:

--I'm continuing to include Medicaid and SCHIP enrollments, which they don't track; this is still a crucially important factor, both for the success of the ACA as well as from a purely humanitarian POV

--Their site is poorly laid out, requiring you to scroll endlessly to find the states, and they only list the most recent number for the day instead of showing any trend lines or alternative sources

--Since I'm using a Google Docs spreadsheet, you can easily export/copy the data to Excel or whatever to do what you will with

--They sort the states by Federal-run and State-run; I've marked the state-run sites as such (blue rows), but have kept them alphabetical for easier tracking

Having said all of that, here's the latest figures as of today:

Total Exchange ENROLLMENTS: 149,417
Total Medicaid/SCHIP Expansion: 397,146

Total Combined: 546,563

It's important to remember that this does NOT mean that only 43,000 more people have been signed up since the beginning of the month--this only represents new numbers from 8 states (I've bold-faced them...California, for instance, added another 24,000 between 11/2 - 11/12).

Now, EnrollMaven had the total at around 50K just before the HHS report came out; the total ended up being more than double what they had listed. If that holds true this month, it suggests that November enrollments will be at least 2x that of October (200K+, or 300K+ total). Still sucky, but still a huge improvement and an upward trend.

As an illustration: If the number of actual enrollments doubles each month, that would be 100K + 200K + 400K + 800K + 1.6M + 3.2M = 6.3 million people by 3/31/14, very close to the 7 million goal. And in Massachusetts, the trend was far greater in Massachusetts (only 123 people enrolled the first month; by the 4th month it was up to 15,500).

Another thing to bear in mind: Even if the HC.gov site continues to suffer, if the state state-run exchanges continue to pick up the slack (well, except for Oregon and Hawaii, which both also have serious issues), it should be noted that those 14 states (+DC) represent 1/3 of the 50 million uninsured people in the country.

Anyway, I'm asking my helpers here at dKos to continue scouring state government reports, twitter feeds and news reports for state-by-state enrollment updates (both the exchanges as well as Medicaid).

ObamacareSignups.net

UPDATE: Thanks to some late-breaking updates out of Hawaii and Kentucky, the number is now over the 150K line:

Total Exchange ENROLLMENTS: 151,283
Total Medicaid/SCHIP Expansion: 402,771

Total Combined: 554,054

UPDATE x2: OK, another late-breaker from Connecticut, although oddly the state officials are reporting a lower number of Medicaid enrollees than the HHS did 2 days ago...clerical error I suppose: