I included the 80K in 4 days info yesterday, but didn't realize the implications of the second sentence until a commentor pointed it out:
The Covered California exchange said sign-ups have been building throughout the week with about 80,000 people picking a health plan Monday through Thursday. An additional 150,000 households created an online account and started the shopping process in the last three days, officials said.
That's 50,000 households--not individuals--PER DAY who JUST ceated an account for 3 days straight.
Pretty sure most of those are actually enrolling even as I type this.
I think this final weekend surge is going to be MUCH larger than even I've been projecting.
Gotta run for the moment, but I'm going ahead and calling it 6.7 million exchange-based QHPs as of now.
OK, I meant to post this yesterday but had to double-check a couple of things with the reporter first. He confirmed that a) the 750K figure was slightly outdated (NY announced a higher total enrollment figure shortly after he posted the story), b) these 10,000 people are indeed enrolled in New York's SHOP exhange for small businesses and are therefore not part of the individual private exchange QHP figure, and c) the 10K figure does include dependents as well as employees.
Therefore, NY's SHOP total just doubled, from around 5,000 as of January to 10,000 today.
Close to 4,000 small businesses across New York state have enrolled their employees in the state's online marketplace for buying health insurance.
The six-month-old market, called an exchange, has become a noteworthy part of the federal Affordable Care Act. The law aims to spark the largest expansion of health insurance nationwide sinceMedicare and Medicaid were created nearly 50 years ago.
Everything I said then is true now, only more so. I appreciate everyone who has helped me out with this project, including the regular site visitors.
Also, just for the hell of it, here's a little snapshot of the site traffic since the begining of the year (I don't have stats from last fall, as I didn't convert the site over from a simple spreadsheet to a true website until the end of December):
As you can see, the first mini-spike happened on Feb. 12, when the January numbers came in and I was absurdly dead-on with my exchange QHP projection. The huge spike at the end culminated yesterday with Paul Krugman's kind words, and traffic peaked at around 17,900 unique visitors.
Looks like the 39K on Monday & Tuesday continued at the same pace all week...supporting my "California 20%" rule (20K in CA = 100K nationally):
SACRAMENTO (AP) — California is seeing a late surge in the number of people signing up for healthinsurance coverage ahead of next week’s deadline – and state officials are encouraging more people to apply.
The state already reported surpassing 1 million enrollees. But Covered California Executive Director Peter Lee said Friday that another 80,000 people enrolled in the past four days alone.
20,000 per day in California is 4x the rate they hit in February.
I'm pretty sure California has now broken 1.2 million all by itself (which makes sense if the 20% rule holds...1.2M = 20% of 6M...)
Based on this and the Oregon entry, I'm increasing my projection from 6.54M to 6.58M as of 3/31.
Another quick update from Oregon; at this point I'm pretty sure that the "Net" QHP number (which removes "terminations & cancellations") is the same as Connecticut--purging the tally of non-payments, adding Oregon to the 100% Paid column:
Medical enrollments through Cover Oregon: 178,057
Total private medical insurance enrollments through Cover Oregon 1: 55,177
Oregon Health Plan enrollments through Cover Oregon: 122,880
Net enrollments: Net private medical: 52,372
This brings Oregon's exchange QHPs up from 50,137 just 3 days earlier, or 2,235...745/day. Compare this with an average of 179/day in February (or 472/day for the first 3 weeks of March).
Medicaid enrollments haven't changed in this report.
As usual for NY, the official press release doesn't include the QHP/Medicaid breakout, but based on past experience someone will point me towards a news story that has it broken out within the hour...anyway, the combined total in the Empire State is now over 782,000:
ALBANY (March 28, 2014) – NY State of Health (NYSOH), the State’s official health plan marketplace, reported that as of 9 a.m. today, 1,130,600 New Yorkers have completed their applications and 782,472 have enrolled for coverage since the launch of the Marketplace on October 1, 2013. More than 70 percent of those who have enrolled to date were uninsured at the time of application.
A rough total number (which I suspect we'll see a lot of this weekend...things are moving very quickly now). Assuming a 20/80 split (typical for Kentucky) of the additional 17,600 total, this should mean roughly 3,500 more QHPs and 14,100 more added to Medicaid, to around 69,500 and 280,500 respectively.
We've been seeing a tremendous increase in the number of people applying and approved each day," says Gwenda Bond in the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services. "We've been seeing about 3,100 each day and I suspect that's even higher this week."
According to the state, an estimated 350,000 uninsured Kentuckians have enrolled in Medicaid or private coverage.
I posted an Arkansas update last night, but here's another...and the "private Medicaid option" numbers are either a little higher or a lot higher depending on the number you use; the wording from the AR DHS is confusing:
233,676 – Total number of private option applicants from state and federal levels.
Of those, 149,666 have been determined eligible for the private option so far and will begin receiving coverage.
Of those determined eligible for the private option, 106,324 have completed the enrollment process (as of 3/21/14). An additional 14,969 have been determined to be better served by traditional Medicaid for a total of 121,293 people who have fully completed the enrollment process.
It sounds like there's 28,373 who are still in the middle of paperwork or something, but the DHS is quite clear that one way or another all 150K will be enrolled in either the "private option" or "standard Medicaid", so I'm going with the higher number until they clarify otherwise. I normally err on the side of caution, but in this case the "will begin receiving coverage" is part of an official DHS press release.
