Revising my projection from 11.20M to 11.15M nationally...entirely due to the federal exchange

So, how likely is HC.gov to reach last year's total in the final week? Well...not very likely, but let's do the math anyway. Again, this is for the 39 states hosted by HC.gov only; it does NOT include the 12 state-based exchanges, which are mostly AHEAD of last year so far.

• Last year, 8,743,642 people selected QHPs via HC.gov total:
  •  4,580,782 actively re-enrolled
  • 1,702,429 were auto-reenrolled
  • 2,460,431 were new enrollees
• Of those 8.74 million total, there are likely around 6.16 million currently enrolled as of December
• Last year, 97% of those still enrolled as of December re-enrolled (actively or passively). If that holds true this year, that'll be around 5.97 million total renewals
• That means HC.gov would need 2.77 million new enrollees total

So, where did things stand as of 12/08?

• 3,025,469 active renewals
• 1,106,963 new enrollees

If 97% of current enrollees do end up being re-enrolled by 12/15, that would add 2.94 million more renewals, for a total of 7.07 million, which means HC.gov would have to also add another 1.67 million new enrollees in the final week.

For comparison, last year they only added 1.08 million new enrollees in the final week, so HC.gov would have to add 590,000 more new enrollees in the final week to pull that off.

This...is unlikely to happen, to put it mildly. As I've noted repeatedly, I expect national enrollment to drop by around 4.9% overall...but for HC.gov specifically, I expect a drop of around 5.3%, or roughly 463,000 people. They're actually down over 545,000 as of 12/08, so it's looking pretty likely that things will fall more short than I projected on the federal exchange...while doing better than I expected on the state-based exchanges, which continue to run about 1.5% ahead of last year as of the moment.

• I projected HC.gov to run 463K behind (8.28M); it's now looking more like 600K behind (8.14M)
• I projeted the SBMs to run 107K behind (2.90M); it's now looking more like they'll run virtually even (3.01 million)

With that in mind, I'm revising my final projection down a bit more from 11.2 million QHP selections to around 11.15 million nationally.