Today I'm narrowing my projection within that range; unless there's a really big absolute-last-minute spike today and tomorrow (which is conceivable), it's looking like the final tally will end up somewhere between 7.8 - 7.9M. 7.75 - 7.85M I suspect the 8M mark will remain tantilizingly out of reach.
Feeling a bit loopy on a rainy Sunday afternoon, so I present the mystery of one of the most significant songs ever released: Young MC's "Bust a Move":
Your best friend Harry has a brother Larry
In five days from now he's gonna marry
He's hoping you can make it there if you can
'Cause in the ceremony you'll be the best man
Question: If Larry is the one getting married, why are YOU the best man instead of his own brother? You're HARRY's best friend, not LARRY's.
For that matter, who waits until 5 days before the ceremony to ask someone to be in their wedding party, especially the best man? That's awfully short notice, barely enough time to get sized for the tux.
Posit: The brothers had some sort of falling out, perhaps over the bride. If so, that still doesn't explain why he'd ask his brother's best friend to be the best man, unless Larry just wants to rub Harry's nose in it.
As it happens, a friend of mine figured out the answer. If no one guesses it today, I'll post the answer tomorrow.
I honestly wasn't sure how to answer this. I had heard that some states already required insurers to allow kids up to 26 to be covered, but wasn't previously aware that NJ (or any other state) went beyond 26...
@ernestine1006 I have no idea. Didn't know any state required policies to offer higher than 26. Would imagine it works like min. wage...
I talked about this a couple of weeks ago, but given that the March HHS report should be released sometime this week (unless it's delayed due to the craziness of the late-March surge), I thought it was important to post again:
The March HHS Enrollment Report may leave off March 30th and 31st, and therefore leave 600,000 exchange QHP enrollments to be tacked onto the April report instead.
Every one of the prior 5 HHS reports on ACA enrollments has been tied to the calendar week instead of the calendar month, cutting the tally off on whatever Saturday happens to fall closest to the end of that month:
His Tweet was intended as snark, of course, but at least a couple of people didn't appear to get the joke, and actually think this means I'm either hypocritical or some sort of 11th Dimensional Chess-playing Double Agent Mole working for the Koch Bros. Not sure how that would work, exactly, but whatever.
OK, I actually do have one update today (it's 8:30 at night and my kid is getting ready for bed).
When I first learned that Washington State's off-exchange total was a whopping 2.2x that of their exchange-based enrollments back on February 20th, I casually noted that if that held true nationally, it would make the off-exchange QHP tally easily 7.7M or higher ...and this was back when the exchange QHPs were only around 3.5M.
However, I also tried to be cautious in my "official" estimate, keeping it to around 4M or so since I didn't know how many there really were beyond the 300K (later 560K) or so I had documented at the time. After all, other states would likely have a much lower ratio of Off- to On-exchange QHPs; In Wisconsin, for instance, Off-Exchange QHPs were only about 23% as high as exchange-based.
As I noted at the time, this puzzled me because around "mid-March" (the point at which the vast bulk of survey responses had come in), the actual number of exchange QHPs was roughly 1 million higher, around 4.9M.
The survey itself lists a +/- 1.1 million margin of error for that figure, but it still didn't make much sense to me, since the official HHS report through 3/01 (2 weeks earlier) was already 4.24 million.
At first, I figured that perhaps they were lopping off about 20% to account for the unpaid enrollments. This would make the 3.9M figure correct, but there was no mention of payments in the survey.
Maryland's press releases are getting shorter and more abrupt. With the enrollment period wrapping up and their exchange site still an utter mess (and about to be completely scrapped and replaced), this isn't terribly surprising.
Still, this is up another 2,184 QHPs and 16,420 Medicaid enrollees in the past week, which isn't too bad, all things considered.
Through April 9, 2014, 65,186 Marylanders have chosen to enroll in qualified health plans through Maryland Health Connection. As of April 8, 248,495 have gained Medicaid coverage in 2014 and remain active in Medicaid.
Enrollments in qualified health plans since March 31 include 2,229 enrollments completed with assistance from a dedicated team responding to Marylanders who contacted our 1-800 hotline and other channels to request additional help.
