May 2014

A rather depressing end to Nevada's first open enrollment period. The state pushed their extension period far beyond any other state (most states stopped at 4/15; Oregon's was 4/30...Nevada kicked it out another month beyond that to 5/30), and still didn't come close to either their initial target or even my own "fair share" target of 73,000 QHP enrollees:

About 35,700 consumers have purchased insurance coverage through the program. Enrollment is far less than an initial target of 118,000.

(and yes, that 35,700 figure is paid, not total; the total number stood at 47,245 a couple of weeks ago).

Nice catch by contributor Esther F....in this article about new parents having a 60-day "Qualifying Life Event" period to add their newborn child to their healthcare plan, there's this bit at the end:

About 164,000 Washington residents enrolled for private health coverage during the last open-enrollment period. About 2,000 or 3,000 have enrolled since then, Frey said.

Those include special enrollments along with “special special” enrollments — people still completing applications because of technical problems, Frey said.

OK, kind of a fuzzy number, but let's split the difference and call it 2,500. That means Washington State has increased their enrollment by about 1.5% since the end of March (WA was one of 2 states--Connecticut was the other one--which did not offer an official extension period). As the article was originally posted on 5/27, the latest the figures could run through is 5/26, so that's about 45 people per day since 3/31. Assuming this pace holds steady, WA should add over 10,000 QHP enrollees to their total by the time the 2nd enrollment period starts on 11/15.

This story out of Connecticut breaks down their Medicaid enrollees using a handy chart and some very specific numbers, giving fairly hard "Strict Expansion" and "Woodworker" updates:

Unsurprisingly, the biggest percentage growth occurred among adults who don’t have minor children. The income limit for people in that category [HUSKY D] to qualify for coverage rose Jan. 1 as part of the federal health law commonly known as Obamacare, from 56 percent of the poverty level to 138 percent.

...But another portion of the Medicaid program also saw a significant enrollment increase, even though eligibility requirements remained largely unchanged. That portion, known as HUSKY A, covers low-income children and their parents.

...Between the end of September and the end of April, total number of people in HUSKY D rose from 94,058 to 137,260 -- a growth of 43,202 people.

During that time, the number covered by HUSKY A grew by 29,792 people, to 460,103 members.

Add another 10,000 enrollees onto the total. Michigan's ACA Medicaid expansion now stands at 84% of the first-year goal, or 54% of the half-million estimated to be eligible for the program:

Healthy Michigan Plan Enrollment Statistics

Beneficiaries with Healthy Michigan Plan Coverage: 269,473

*Statistics as of May 27, 2014 

Huh. The Minnesota exchange just released updated data as of 5/22; this brings another 4 days of numbers into view:

.@MNsure enrollment as of 5/26/14: 127,712 in MA, 46,836 in MinnesotaCare and 50,793 in QHP. Total: 225,341. pic.twitter.com/uDzt8AHqcO

— MNsure (@MNsure) May 27, 2014

OK, so that's another 166 QHPs and 958 more people added to Medicaid in the past 4 days.

MN's off-season QHP rate is now 697 in 34 days, or 20.5 per day. If that holds steady, that's around 615 per month, or around 4,300 more QHPs by the time the 2nd open enrollment period opens on November 15.

OK, according to the March/April HHS report, Colorado's official QHP tally as of 4/19 was 125,402. However, according to the state exchange itself, the tally as of 4/15 (the actual end of open enrollment) was 127,233. I'm not sure whether the difference is due to purging unpaid enrollments, clerical errors on one side or the other or what, but they appear to have added either another 2,919 QHPs between 4/20 - 5/03, or another 1,088 between 4/16 - 5/03, depending on which starting number/date you use:

Reporting Period: 10/1/13 - 5/3/14

• Covered Lives:
  • Individual: 128,321
  • SHOP: 1,983

Mr. Brann--

On May 25, 2014 you emailed me with the following request:

I am an insurance agent and in the communities I serve...south texas...San Antonio, Austin, we saw limited demand...so these numbers amaze me...can I advertise on your site...and reference you on my site?

I took a look at your website, and I'm a little confused. According to your site, the healthcare policies you offer are "not Obamacare compliant". There's technically no such thing as "Obamacare"...the actual name of the law is "The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act", generally shortened as "the Affordable Care Act." While "Obamacare is a popular nickname for the law, it's a bit troubling to see a supposedly professional insurance agency using slang terminology throughout the website.

Over the past 7 months, plenty of healthcare reporters, insurance executives and political pundits have started following this site and/or my Twitter feed. For the most part the ones I know of tend to be either of unknown ideology or left-leaning, but there's also a substantial number of Republican, Conservative, Libertarian or other wise right-leaning types, and that's fine.

I've butted heads publicly with a few of these folks. In some cases they've presented honest, intelligent disagreement; in others they've spewed tired, BS talking points. Here's a great opportunity to prove whether you're dealing an intellectually honest hand or not. I present you with the following:

MCCONNELL: KY. EXCHANGE UNCONNECTED TO HEALTH LAW

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) -- Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell says he would try to repeal the Affordable Care Act if he's elected Senate majority leader.

But the veteran senator won't say what would happen to the 413,000 Kentuckians who have health insurance through the state's health care exchange.

McConnell told reporters Friday that the fate of the state exchange is unconnected to the federal health care law. Yet the exchange would not exist, if not for the law that created it.

That's not me saying it; that's the actual headline and the conclusion of a report by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation:

RENTON — The first look at the Affordable Care Act’s impact on New Jersey reveals the percentage of uninsured people is on track to reach its lowest level in nearly a quarter of a century, according to a new report released Thursday by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

The proportion of uninsured adults decreased 38 percent from September to early March, according to the foundation. That decline is likely to accelerate, knowing that many people waited until the last minute to beat the March 30 enrollment deadline.

"These findings suggest that uninsurance in New Jersey is at its lowest level since 1990," according to the report produced by the foundation and the Rutgers Center for State Health Policy.

Dear (outgoing Director) Kathleen Sebelius, (presumptive incoming Director) Sylvia Burwell, and whomever is in charge in between:

Your office is not supposed to be a political one. I, however, have the luxury of not being restricted by that fact. I'm a proud, unapologetically progressive Democrat. While I certainly have my issues with President Obama and the ACA, in general I think that it's an excellent start towards an eventual goal of a single payer healthcare system. While I'm still disapointed as to why they didn't simply drop the "65" age requirement from Medicare (perhaps phasing it in 5 years at a time...60, 55, 50 and so on, with an accompanying funding mechanism), or at the very least add a Public Option to compete with the private corporations, I do understand that the political realities at the time presumably didn't allow for either one.

First Oregon told Oracle to go pound sand after paying the company hundreds of millions of dollars for a useless website; now Nevada has officially done the same thing to Xerox:

The Silver State Health Insurance Exchange board voted unanimously Tuesday to end its relationship with Xerox, the vendor contracted in 2012 to build the exchange’s Nevada Health Link website.

In place of Xerox, the exchange will adopt the federal Healthcare.gov exchange’s eligibility and enrollment functions for the sign-up period that begins Nov. 15, though it will keep its status and funding as a state-controlled system. The exchange will also issue a request for proposals to evaluate replacement systems in coming years. A new platform could come from a state with a functional marketplace, or from a vendor with a similar, proven program.

Unlike Massachusetts, which is taking a dual-path approach (they're scrambling to replace their own crappy site with a new one while simultaneously preparing to move over to HC.gov just in case the first plan doesn't pan out in time), Nevada is sort of doing the opposite: They're moving over to HC.gov this year, but reserving the right to try a do-over on their own exchange for 2016 and beyond.

Wyoming's QHP enrollments didn't add up to much (understandable given that the entire state only has 576,000 people), but the state insurance commissioner states that around 92% of those who did enroll have paid up so far:

Nearly 12,000 people in Wyoming have enrolled in a plan on the federal marketplace created by the Affordable Care Act, according to the latest data announced Monday at a legislative committee meeting.

About 11,000 of them have begun paying their premiums, Wyoming Insurance Commissioner Tom Hirsig told members of the Joint Labor, Health and Social Services Committee at Casper College.

“I’m surprised, frankly, that there’s this many,” Hirsig said. “I was thinking 7,000 or 8,000.”

The actual number of exchange QHPs in Wyoming is 11,970, so yep, 11K would be about 92% of that.

(To clarify the last statement: Contributor Esther F. also gives a link to another story which clarifies that the "7-8K" quote refers to how many people he thought would enroll, not how many he figured would pay):

OK, due to my unexpectedly-far-longer-lasting bout of shingles, I've gotten a bit backed up with my ACA news the past few weeks, but I did want to address the "cost per enrollee" story which popped up a week or so ago:

Sometimes there really are economies of scale. And the nation’s health insurance exchanges may be a case in point.

As rocky as its rollout was, it cost the federal exchange, healthcare.gov, an average of $647 of federal tax dollars to sign up each enrollee, according to a new report.  It cost an average of $1,503 – well over twice as much – to sign up each person in the 15 exchanges run by individual states and Washington, D.C.

The article (and others like it) goes on to break out the individual state exchange costs. Some do better than others, of course, and Hawaii comes in dead last (in part simply because their uninsured population is so small to begin with). While it's certainly interesting to see which ones were the most efficient and which were the least, there's a big part of me which keeps asking "why is anyone surprised by this?"

If I'm reading this correctly, the breakdown of new Medicaid enrollees in Iowa is 20K "strict expansion" and another 75K who are either renewals or woodworkers. Using my 20% rule of thumb, that should be around 15,000 woodworkers:

Of the 95,000 Iowans enrolled in the state's health insurance programs - collectively called the Iowa Health and Wellness Plan - more than 75,000 are Medicaid carryovers or people newly eligible for Medicaid under the program's expansion. More than 1,900 such people came from Dubuque County.

...The rest of the Iowa Health and Wellness Plan enrollees - almost 20,000 - are enrolled through the state's alternative to further Medicaid expansion. They have incomes between 100 percent and 133 percent of the federal poverty level. Of these, 556 were from Dubuque County.

A slight increase in exchange QHPs since mid-April (either via final data entry corrections or qualifying life events?), and a solid increase in Medicaid/CHIP enrollees:

As of April 29, 2014, 275,090 individuals have gained Medicaid coverage in 2014 and remain active in Medicaid. This includes the 95,889 PAC enrollees who were automatically converted on January 1, 2014 to full Medicaid coverage.

As of May 10, 2014, 67,907 individuals have enrolled in a qualified health plan.

Well, here at ACASignups.net I'm nothing if not comprehensive...Hawaii has added a whopping 69 exchange QHP enrollees and 3 (yes, 3) SHOP enrollees in the past week or so...

Total since October 1, 2013

• 31,758 Applications completed in the Individual Marketplace
• 9,286 Individuals and families enrolled in the Individual Marketplace
• 595 Employers applied to SHOP Marketplace
• 631 Employees and dependents enrolled via SHOP Marketplace

Minnesota's official exchange QHP tally has dropped by a whopping...9 people  since the end of April. Meanwhile, their Medicaid tally has shot up another 10,262 people:

As of 5/13:

• 120,749 Medical Assistance
• 50,540 QHP
• 45,121 Minnesota Care
• Shop: 761 x 1.8 = 1,370

I may have had some issues with Avalere Health's methodology in the past, but they're pretty well respected in the industry, and they've certainly brought up legitimate issues with my own methodology as well (they're the ones who pointed out that the early version of my Medicaid/CHIP estimates was mixing "baseline churn" into the mix, which has since been corrected).

Anyway, they're out with an interesting new study which estimates that there of those newly-added to the Medicaid/CHIP roles, roughly 550,000 of them--specifically in the 24 NON-expansion states--rightly belong in the "woodworker" category: People who already qualified for Medicaid under the pre-ACA rules, but who didn't enroll until after October 1, 2013 for any number of reasons (not knowing they qualified, not knowing how to apply, being embarrassed about doing so, etc). Since the ACA exchanges also included a massive education/outreach effort (some of which even spilled over into the states which didn't expand the Medicaid program), and since the application process was streamlined in many states as part of the law, these folks who "came out of the woodwork" to enroll in Medicaid are rightly considered part of the success of the ACA specifically.

Michigan may have been 3 months late to the Medicaid expansion game, but once we got started, things really took off. The original target was 320,000 adults in the state...and MI has already reached over 74% of that goal:

Healthy Michigan Plan Enrollment Statistics
Total Healthy Michigan Plan Beneficiaries: 237,329

*Statistics as of May 12, 2014 
*Updated every Monday at 3 p.m.

My own calculations (based on KFF.org data) give the total number of Michigan residents eligible for Medicaid expansion as about 500,000; even at that number, 237K still represents over 47%, which is fantastic.

Looks like last week's claim of 9,800 QHPs was a bit of an error...according to the official exchange update, the combined total of QHPs + SHOP enrollments is around 9,800:

Total since October 1, 2013

31,378 Applications completed in the Individual Marketplace
9,217 Individuals and families enrolled in the Individual Marketplace
588 Employers applied to SHOP Marketplace
628 Employees and dependents enrolled via SHOP Marketplace

OK, I know I recently posted my "final" update to The Graph for the first Open Enrollment period...but I included an asterisk next to "final" for two reasons: First, because there will obviously still be more enrollments added throughout the summer and fall (Medicaid, SHOP, etc); second, because I've been debating one other major addition for awhile.

As regular readers know, when the famous RAND Corp. survey came out a month or so ago, there was a lot of hubbub about their claims of up to 7.8 million OFF-exchange QHPs between October and mid-March. I made a note of this figure, but eventually downshifted in favor of the 5 million off-exchange QHP figure estimated by the CBO.

ORIGINAL POST: MAY 2014. UPDATE BELOW: OCTOBER 2017.

As regular readers of this site know, I make no bones about my personal politics. I'm very much a progressive Democrat, and my ideology comes out from time to time in my commentary. However, I do my best not to allow that to influence the data or how I present it.

When the enrollment numbers sucked, I agreed that they sucked and recommended that the HHS Dept. be forthcoming with the data anyway. When the Hawaii exchange was still subject to the infamous Heartbleed bug a week or so after it was publicized, I called them on it publicly. When states like Massachusetts subjected a couple hundred thousand of their citizens to a shaky, uncertain "limbo" status due to their exchange being screwed up, I didn't try to cover that over. When a solid case was made that the "3.1 million" young adult figure that the Obama administration has been touting for months may actually be only half of that, I presented the argument, the source, the reasoning and make sure to include the lower figure on The Graph. When the RAND Corp. survey claimed that there have been an additional 8.2 million Employer-Supplied Insurance policies since last fall, I declined to add them to the total due to the bold claim and lack of any collaborating evidence (I still list this figure as a footnote, but am not including it on the Graph).

The numbers are the numbers.

I say all of this because the following is sure to cause quite a bit of controversy...but a) it's related to the ACA, b) it's a serious issue and c) it's horrifying.

In spite of their several-hundred-million-dollar meltdown of a website, Oregon has managed to pull off an impressive feat: Between private QHPs, standard Medicaid/CHIP and their "fast track" program (not included below), they've enrolled nearly 400,000 people in healthcare plans of one sort or another via the ACA.

May 8, 2014
Update: Private coverage and Oregon Health Plan enrollment through Cover Oregon

Medical enrollments through Cover Oregon: 271,180
Total private medical insurance enrollments through Cover Oregon 1: 77,583                

Oregon Health Plan enrollments through Cover Oregon: 193,597
Total private dental insurance enrollments through CoverOregon 1: 15,926               

Net enrollments 
Net private medical: 72,890
Net private dental: 14,602

As with my recent Alabama post, in which BCBS of Alabama stated that they're seeing an 82% payment rate out of an 87% market share, this is not proof absolute for Maine, but it's the best guideline we have for the state at the moment: In yesterday's Congressional testimony, executives for Wellpoint, the 2nd largest insurer in the country, stated that 90% of their exchange QHP enrollments have been paid so far. I took a look at the states Wellpoint operates in; there's a good dozen or so, and their market share varies in each one, but there's one, Maine, where they had a whopping 74% market share last year.

OK, this doesn't give a complete picture of Alabama's exchange QHP payment rate for two reasons: First, because the 82% figure is a blend of 85K via the exchange and another 20K off-exchange enrollees; second, because while BCBS does have the lion's share (87%) of exchange QHP enrollees in the state, there's still another 12,870 QHPs (out of the 97,870 total in Alabama) which belong to other insurance companies, which may have a higher or lower payment rate to date.

Having said that, assuming that the ratios are representative on both counts, it looks like about 82% of Alabama's enrollees have paid so far:

Some 82 percent of those enrolling in Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Alabama through the exchanges have paid their first month's premium, mirroring figures released today by other large insurers in preparation for congressional testimony.

"We have enrolled over 105,000 members both on and off the federally facilitated exchange in Alabama," said Koko Mackin, BCBS of Alabama said in an email to Al.com. "Over 85,000 members enrolled through the federal exchange, while another 20,000 signed up directly with Blue Cross -- 82% of our exchange enrollees have paid their first month’s premium."

OK, not exactly the most stunning headline in the world (although this does appear to be shocking news to a certain anti-ACA political party), but still kind of cool to have some solid numbers on just how many lives could be saved with universal coverage:

Results: Reform in Massachusetts was associated with a significant decrease in all-cause mortality compared with the control group (−2.9%; P = 0.003, or an absolute decrease of 8.2 deaths per 100 000 adults). Deaths from causes amenable to health care also significantly decreased (−4.5%; P < 0.001). Changes were larger in counties with lower household incomes and higher prereform uninsured rates. Secondary analyses showed significant gains in coverage, access to care, and self-reported health. The number needed to treat was approximately 830 adults gaining health insurance to prevent 1 death per year.

Limitations: Nonrandomized design subject to unmeasured confounders. Massachusetts results may not generalize to other states.

Conclusion: Health reform in Massachusetts was associated with significant reductions in all-cause mortality and deaths from causes amenable to health care.

If I'm going to boast about the states where high percentages of QHPs are paid for (WA, MA, CT, OR, WV & RI, for starters), I do have to be honest and present the lower figures as well. According to the SC insurance commissioner, only about 71.3% of exchange QHPs in that state had been paid up as of 4/30, which is admittedly not great:

Of the 119,784 individuals in South Carolina who applied and selected a policy on the federal exchange, 85,453 - about 71 percent - paid their first month's premium by April 30, Farmer said. That was the last possible day to make that first payment. Those who didn't pay by that date aren't actually insured, he said.

As a side note, that 119,784 figure is actually higher than the official 4/19 HHS total of 118,324; presumably another 1,460 trickled in from 4/20 - 4/30. Even using the lower number, however, the paid rate would only be 1% higher (72.2%).

I should also note that while 71% isn't very good, it's still 10% higher than the 61% that the GOP House Committee report claimed for SC last week.

Overdid it last week; partial relapse of sorts.

The main symptoms are gone but the pain is still bad and now it seems to have gotten into my eye itself.

Went to the ophthalmologist this morning, on eye medication etc.

no updates for a few days again, sorry.

Not much for me to add to this, really, other than to say that THIS is the correct answer to the "But...but how many were ALREADY INSURED???" complaints:

Uninsured rate down nearly four percentage points since late 2013

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The uninsured rate for U.S. adults in April was 13.4%, down from 15.0% in March. This is the lowest monthly uninsured rate recorded since Gallup and Healthways began tracking it in January 2008, besting the previous low of 13.9% in September of that year.

The uninsured rate peaked at 18.0% in the third quarter of 2013, but has consistently declined since then. This downward trend in the uninsured rate coincided with the health insurance marketplace exchanges opening in October 2013, and accelerated as the March 31 deadline to purchase health insurance coverage approached -- and passed -- for most uninsured Americans. The Obama administration decided in late March to extend the deadline to April 15 for those who had already begun the enrollment process.

In addition to the March/April HHS report being released on Thursday, the CMS Dept. decided to take care of everything in one shot and also released the March (only...no April data included) CMS report as well.

As a result, I just finished plugging in the data from both reports onto the Medicaid/CHIP spreadsheet (followed, of course, by having to go through and delete out big chunks of the data from one or the other to avoid double-counting or any Medicaid renewals).

Normally each of these reports (which are usually released a couple of weeks apart) bumps the new Medicaid/CHIP numbers up by a half-million or so apiece after separating out the renewals & baseline churn. This time around, the impact looks much more dramatic because 1) both reports were added on the same day, 2) the HHS report includes 2/3 of April as well as March and 3) there appears to have been a bit of a spike in Medicaid enrollments as the 3/31 open enrollment deadline approached just as there was for QHPs (this may sound strange since there's no deadline for Medicaid, but a lot of people might not have realized that, and the frenzied outreach effort probably swept up a lot of potential Medicaid enrollees in the final weeks of March as well).

One of the more interesting parts of the March/April HHS report is that they finally released the data for the "Are you currently insured?" question on the HC.gov enrollment process.

Given all the fuss about "But how many were ALREADY INSURED???" from various outlets, this would seem to be a bit of a Holy Grail answer: At last, we know the answer, and it's pretty impressive: Only 13% responded that they had health insurance coverage at the time of their application, meaning a whopping 87% were newly insured! Wowzers!!

HOWEVER...there's a LOT of caveats here, just as there were with the infamous McKinsey study which claimed only 27% were previously uninsured back in February.

As the HHS report itself puts it:

The District of Columbia is one of a handful of exchanges which went beyond the 4/15 extension period out to 4/30; here's DC's final tally:

From October 1, 2013 to April 30, 2014, 44,833 people have enrolled through DC Health Link in private health plans or Medicaid:

• 11,106 people enrolled in private health plans through the DC Health Link individual and family marketplace;
• 20,497 people were determined eligible for Medicaid coverage through DC Health Link; and
• 13,230 people enrolled through the DC Health Link small business marketplace.

I'm assuming this is due to correction of some clerical errors, double entries, unpaid or cancelled acounts and so on, but the 4/26 county-by-county tally from Connect for Health Colorado is actually about 1,500 lower than the 4/19 total from the HHS report:

123,899

Simple and to the point: These are all expansion enrollees:

In Illinois, an additional 287,000 have enrolled in expanded Medicaid coverage.

(I previously had the total at 350K, but that included determinations, not actual enrollees).

The key point of this article is that it specifically designates the 98K as being expansion enrollees (no woodworkers/churn):

Another 98,000 New Jersey residents were determined to be eligible for the new, expanded version of Medicaid.

UPDATE: More accurate number from another source:

Another 98,240 Garden State residents enrolled in the expanded Medicaid program, NJ Family Care. 

This is really part of the actual HHS report, but I haven't had a chance to plug in the Medicaid numbers for every state yet so I'm including it here for now:

The state reports that nearly 263,000 Marylanders have gained Medicaid coverage in 2014.

Remember, the HHS report from yesterday only runs through 4/19...there's still 11 days worth of data missing from most states...

DOVER, Del. (AP) — Final enrollment numbers released by state officials Thursday show that 14,397 Delawareans signed up for health insurance coverage under the federal Affordable Care Act in the first year of open enrollment.

....Health and Social Services Secretary Rita Landgraf told the state Health Care Commission that 4,217 other Delawareans were found eligible for coverage under expanded Medicaid rules the state adopted as part of an effort to reduce the number of uninsured residents.

A reader sent in an interesting report on the DoD's TRICARE program, which apparently was already an existing military version of the ACA "young adults on parents plans" provision. Prior to the ACA, TRICARE only covered young adults up to 21 or 23; the ACA expanded this to the same 26 year old cut-off as non-military families:

Page 52 - As shown in the chart at left, enrollment went from over 21,000 in FY 2012 to almost 31,000 in FY 2013. 

Also, although TYA began with the Standard option, Prime now accounts for almost 60 percent of total TYA enrollment.

This is in reference to the Tricare Young Adult program coverage for those under 26. This is a small amount but doesn't seem to fit anywhere except the under 26 coverage.

Tricare used to cover dependents under 21 with extension to 23 for those in school. The ACA enable expansion to under 26 for a fee ($180/month)

I'm not adding this to the actual spreadsheet since a) it's such a tiny number and b) it's hard to say how many of the 10K increase is specifically due to the ACA, but I thought it was worth at least mentioning.

Hmmm...this article about Michigan's final ACA exchange tally is very specific about the Healthy Michigan program (Michigan's ACA expansion program), claiming the total is nearly 200K total...but if so, this would be an increase of over 41,000 from just 3 days earlier, which I find hard to believe (though that'd be awesome if it's correct).

199,862 minus the 36,307 who were bulk-transferred over from the existing state program = 163,555. The update from just 3 days ago had the total as 158,654.

HOWEVER, it occurs to me that I may have actually assumed that the 158K figure included the 36K transferees...if it didn't, then this makes much more sense, since the difference over those 3 days is only 4,901 people.

If that's the case, then this is VERY impressive indeed, and I apologize for lowballing the earlier number! I'll go ahead and use the higher number for now; on Monday there will a new official update on the state government site, and I can verify things one way or the other:

Well, I had it down as 8.03M as of 4/15; the actual was 8.02M as of 4/19. So...hard to say precisely how accurate I was since the dates don't match, but obviously I slightly overshot the mark. On the other hand, I also called 8.14M as of 4/30, so presumably there will be a follow-up report in another week or so with the "mop-up" enrollments from the final 11 days.

• TEXAS: Was 295K as of 3/01; 734K as of 4/19
• FLORIDA: Was 442K as of 3/01; 984K as of 4/19
• GEORGIA: Was 139K as of 3/01; 317K as of 4/19

I'll start plugging the actual numbers into the spreadsheet next.

UPDATE: OK, I've plugged all of the official HHS numbers into the spreadsheet. There are a handful of states where the numbers don't quite match, presumably due to clerical cleanup, double-entries being removed, etc. However, there are six states with significant differences, two of which I can't figure out:

OK, I was suckered about this a couple of weeks ago, but I'm pretty damned certain about it this time: The HHS Dept. should be releasing their official ACA exchange report for all of March (and almost certainly the first half of April) in about 2 hours (around 2:15pm).

The GOP will no doubt claim that they're "only" releasing the March/April data today in response to their asinine "67% paid" report from last night, but a) HHS has already issued a formal response (more on this below), and b) the March HHS report has been widely expected for almost 3 weeks now.