Dear California & New York: It's all up to you now...

Yesterday I publicly declared that total QHP selections nationally had reached the 9 million milestone. I based this on 4 data points:

• The 6.59 million confirmed by the HHS Dept. for the 37 states run through HC.gov,
• The 980K confirmed by the 14 assorted state-run exchanges,
• The unreported renewals (both active and automatic) from California & New York, and
• Another roughly 150,000 scattered amongst all 50 states & DC since the date of their most recent updates until today (which varies from as little as 1 day to as much as 25 days in the case of Idaho).

If you do the math, you'll see that the biggest missing piece here is the 3rd item above: Covered California and New York State of Health have, to date, still refused to give out any re-enrollment/renewal data for 2014 QHP enrollees. Not just autorenewal numbers, but active renewals as well.

CA supposedly started out with around 1.12 million current enrollees as of mid-October, while New York supposedly had roughly 379,000 as of mid-September. I'll assume each of these had dropped a bit further by the time the current open enrollment period rolled around; perhaps 1.1 million and 370K respectively.

Assuming somewhere between 85-90% of these either renew/switch plans on the exchange manually or are automatically renewed, I'm expecting roughly 960K total renewals out of California and another 330K out of New York, for a total of close to 1.3 million...but until they actually report the data, this is speculation.

If I'm reasonably close on this, then my 9 million total stands; if I've significantly overestimated the renewal numbers, I could be off by up to several hundred thousand.

Oh, yeah: Hawaii hasn't given out their autorenewal numbers yet either, so that could be another...10,000 or so, I suppose. Literally a rounding error at this point.