Straying from the Path: IF 6M Exchange QHPs are announced today, then... (UPDATED)

Note: This entry is purely speculative at this point (I'm ignoring Gandalf's advice here and straying off the path).

OK, earlier today I said:

IF it's true that around 79,000 people per day have been enrolling nationally all of this week, that means that yes, we could indeed have already surpassed the 6 million mark...THIS week.

My current projection has exchange QHPs breaking the 6M mark sometime late today (Thursday) or early tomorrow (Friday), but it's conceivable that we did already pass it late last night or early this morning.

Then, about an hour ago, I posted this update which embraced the bold-faced part of that last sentence:

I'm gonna go for it and predict an announcement later today that the 6 million exchange QHP milestone has been hit.

(to clarify: if they announce it today, it probably actually crossed 6M sometime last night or early this morning)

...This also makes it far more likely that my 79K/day projection for the current week is accurate as well.

Well, I'm gonna go one step further (if I'm collapse in a heap, might as well get it out of the way today):

• IF exchange QHPs really did hit 5.2 million in "the middle of March" (figure around the 16th), and...
• IF the HHS Dept. does announce that 6M was hit last night or this morning, and...
• IF the exchange QHP enrollment rate has indeed been averaging around 79K/day for the current week (since Sunday)...
• THEN the grand total as of midnight on March 31st would be a minimum of 6.4 million (6M + 395K)...which is what I have projected at the moment anyway.

However, that assumes that the last 5 days stay at the current level, which has obviously already ramped up considerably.

So, how much more will things ramp up if all 3 of the above points are accurate?

Well, I figure it'll probably stay at around 80K/day today and tomorrow, then go into overdrive over the weekend and hit perhaps 100-110K/day on Saturday, Sunday and Monday.

Which in turn would mean as high as 6.46 - 6.49 million.

If the final weekend really shoots through the roof, breaking 6.5 million is certainly doable under these circumstances.

Again, however, there's an awful lot of "ifs" listed above, so I'm not bumping up my official projection just yet. We'll see what this afternoon brings (if anything at all...)

UPDATE: And then there's this story out of yesterday's Wall St. Journal. While the full story is behind a pay firewall, Mediaite provides the key passage:

This is set against a background of surging enrollment, which many expected to occur before the final(ish) deadline. The administration is racing to reach 6 million enrollees (it has already passed 5 million), and the Wall Street Journal quotes several sources (anonymous, natch) claiming that enrollment has picked up extensively, with 100,000 applications being processed on both Monday and Tuesday (compared to a roughly 33,000 average in previous months).

Holy cats. Again, these are anonymous sources, etc etc, but at the same time, I did just make the point last night that California reported 39K QHPs on Monday & Tuesday (about 19.5K each day), and California has had a fairly consistent record of enrolling around 20% of the total nationally, which would mean 100K would be right  on target.