Yesterday, the New York Times posted an infographic depicting the breakout of insurance coverage for everyone in the country, based entirely on my data. The grand total of ACA-specific health insurance coverage topped out at around 31.4 million, but left out close to a million people due to rounding and to deliberately leaving out a few items (such as people enrolled in small business coverage via the SHOP exchanges, which I estimate to be around 220,000 people nationally).
The 51 states (including the District of Columbia) that provided enrollment data for December 2014 reported nearly 69.7 million individuals were enrolled in Medicaid and CHIP. This enrollment count is point-in-time (on the last day of the month) and includes all enrollees in the Medicaid and CHIP programs who are receiving a comprehensive benefit package.
547,263 additional people were enrolled in December 2014 as compared to November 2014 in the 51 states that reported comparable December and November data.
(And yes, the "51 states" wording is CMS's, not mine)
On Friday, the MA Health Connector confirmed 134,000 QHP selections out of 237,000 people determined eligible for QHPs as of 2/18. Since then they've added another 6,614 QHP determinations.
For most of the 2015 open enrollment period, the number of people actually selecting a plan has hovered between 45-50% of the total determinations. However, as of last Thursday it had shot up to over 56%, and given that today is the final day to enroll for most people, it's a pretty safe bet that anyone who has bothered going through the trouble of creating an account, logging in, plugging in all of their info and submitting an application is also going to complete the process by actually checking out a policy (and presumably paying their first premium, since today's the deadline for that as well).
Therefore, I'm pretty sure that the total is well above 140K by now, and likely somewhat higher than that (since that would still leave another 103,600 people who had previously submitted an application but not completed the process as well).
On Sunday, February 22nd, the "Waiting in Line by Midnight" enrollment extension period officially ended for residents of 38 states (all 37 on Healthcare.Gov, plus California). The overtime period ended on Friday in Minnesota, on Saturday in Idaho and on Monday in Massachusetts, Rhode Island & Vermont.
That leaves 7 states (plus DC) still accepting some or all enrollments as of today:
IMPORTANT!! The table and graph below make several important assumptions about how the rest of 2015 will play out:
First, this assumes that another 1.8 million people nationally take advantage of the special "Tax Season" enrollment period recently announced by the HHS Dept. The exact date ranges differ for many of the state exchanges (from as early as February 17th in Washington State to as late as May 30th in Vermont), but for the most part we're talking about March 15th - April 30th. 1.8 million is complete dart-throwing on my part; the number of people nationally who are eligible to enroll during this period is somewhere between 0 - 6 million, so there's no way of knowing. 1.8 million just sounded reasonable to me.
As always, I'm assuming that roughly 88% of those who select QHP policies end up paying at least the first month's premium.
This morning, The New York Times ran an Op-Ed by Steven Rattner, including an impressive infographic (the type that represents the U.S. population as lines of silhouette icons representing 1 million people apiece), breaking out the entire country by what type of healthcare coverage they currently have. The point, of course, was to demonstrate just how many people either have healthcare coverage at all thanks to the ACA or how many have improved coverage thanks to it. Every data point presented is credited directly to this website.
I'm not saying this to brag (although it is pretty nifty...my mom is pretty geeked about her kid's work showing up in the Sunday New York Times). I'm mentioning it because I was expecting to receive a flood of attacks on the data and my credibility. There's a bunch of numbers listed there, and the "these are rough estimates" disclaimer at the bottom is pretty innoucuous. Instead...crickets.
I know I've been #humblebragging re. media attention lately. Part of that was to explain the server slowdown a few days ago; part of it is that I'm terribly insecure, and with the open enrollment period wrapping up, I suppose I'm starting to get a bit anxious about my relevance again, bla bla bla. My apologies for that.
Of course, with the recent #ACAOvertime extensions, followed up almost immediately by the #ACATaxTime enrollment periods, it sounds like my lease on relevance has been extended (again) by another couple of months (Vermont is extending their tax period all the way out until the end of May, for heaven's sake!). Plus, of course, the King v. Burwell SCOTUS case will be smack in between the two, and the decision on that isn't expected until June, so I guess there'll be plenty of material for this site for a few more months yet...
Having said that, there are a couple of items to note:
Over the past 2 days, enrollment data updates were released through at least the official February 15th deadline by DC, Vermont, Colorado, Massachusetts and Kentucky (Massachusetts and Rhode Island's new full deadline is now 2/23). In addition, Connecticut released a partial update which ran through Friday the 13th (not including the final surge weekend).
That means that aside from the 2 days in Connecticut, there's only 1 state which is missing significant enrollment data prior to the 2/15 deadline: Idaho. Idaho hasn't issued a full enrollment update report since January 13th, and their QHP tally hasn't been updated since the 2nd monthly ASPE report on January 27th, which brought their data up through January 17th (90,567 QHP selections).
