Wisconsin: How to calculate the QHP total as of 6/1 without having that actual number

Contributor deaconblues provides a very nice catch today: A story about Wisconsin's enrollment figures which gives all the tools necessary to calculate the state's total and paid QHP enrollments as well as the off-exchange total to boot...all without actually providing any of those numbers, which is kind of a neat trick!

Let's break it down:

Wisconsin’s Office of the Commissioner of Insurance has released information concerning the number of people that have acquired health insurance coverage as of June 1 of this year. The state’s Governor, Scott Walker, intends to cut the number of uninsured people throughout Wisconsin in half within the foreseeable future. According to state officials, the number of uninsured people in the state as of March of this year stood at 556,000.

Some 166,000 Wisconsin residents have purchased health insurance over the past several months, according to the Office of the Insurance Commissioner. Of these, some 134,000 people purchased coverage from the state’s health insurance exchange.

OK, the official exchange QHP total as of April 19th stood at 139,815. The article above gives the paid enrollee number as 134,000 as of June 1st. If the dates matched up, that would suggest a payment rate of 96%, which would far more impressive than my own estimate of around 90% nationally.

However, the dates don't line up; there's an extra 42 days of off-season enrollments to account for, from 4/20 - 6/01. Assuming that the 134K figure represents 90% of the total enrollments, that's 90% of roughly 148,900 people total.

In addition, by subtracting the 134K from the 166K total who have "purchased health insurance" over the "past several months" (presumably from January through the end of May), we get 32,000 off-exchange enrollments for the state. This doesn't actually increase the total of around 8 million to date, it just helps break it out by state a bit.

 Unfortunately, this only takes Wisconsin through June 1st, not July, but it's still a lot better than only having data through April 19th, so I'll take it.