Good gravy. 391,000 people in North Carolina?? They were only at 200,546 as of 3/01. Even if you assume this number includes Medicaid enrollments, that's still only another 55,691 as of 3/01...and NC is not an expansion state. Assuming that 391K includes both...and assuming the same 78/22 split between the two...that still suggests that QHPs have gone up to around 305,000, a 105,115 increase over the end of February, and over 3.8x the February daily rate.
If it doesn't include Medicaid (which seems likely from the wording of the article), then it's a whopping 190,454 increase--a doubling of their 3/01 total, and a near 7x increase over February.
I find either of these rather difficult to believe, so for the moment I'm only entering it into this blog entry. If I can confirm the QHPs as either of these I'll change it tonight or tomorrow.
While waiting to see whether I was right about the national exchange-based QHP total hitting the 5.5M mark yesterday (and bear in mind that there's no guarantee that HHS will make an announcement about it even if I was correct; they didn't do so for 3.5M or 4.5M...I just figure that they will since it's a logical milestone and would be a nice momentum-building PR move going into the final stretch), I just wanted to call attention to this article from yesterday out of KTVU/Fox in California:
SAN FRANCISCO — One week from Monday is the open enrollment deadline for Covered California. The insurance exchange hit the one million mark for sign-ups last week, and is expecting about 20,000 people a day to sign up in the final push.
I've already contacted the reporter who wrote the story to make absolutely certain this doesn't include Medicaid enrollees, but the context makes me pretty sure they're talking about exchange QHPs only. Also, "expecting" 20K/day doesn't necessarily mean they've already ramped up to that; it could just mean that they're preparing for that volume just in case.
A lengthy comment in response to my "5M as of Sunday" post from yesterday criticizes the work done at ACASignups.net for a variety of reasons. For the most part these are the same issues which I've already addressed repeatedly, but he's more polite about it than the prior critic and some of his points are new (or at least I haven't really talked about them before), so I've decided to respond:
Let me start by saying that the work you have done is truly impressive but it is beyond comprehension that we can not get this type of granular info from the people who are actually responsible for designing, implementing and running this program. They are either completely incompetent or intentionally withholding the detailed data and simply releasing the more favorable headline numbers.
Just throwing that out there again. Since it's a Sunday, I wouldn't expect an HHS announcement until tomorrow. I could be wrong, of course; as I keep stressing, I'm NOT Nate Silver...and judging by the reactionto Mr. Silver'srelaunched FiveThirtyEight site the other day, even he doesn't seem to be acting like Nate Silver at the moment, at least when it comes to climate science. Hopefully this is all a big misunderstanding, but as a long-time fan of his, I admit to being extremely disturbed by this development.
Anyway, back on topic: Regarding my 5.5M projection for today (Sunday, 3/23), it's pretty simple: If QHPs haven't hit 5.5M by today, the odds of hitting 6.2M by 3/31 are worse; if they have, then I'm virtually certain that 6.2M will be reached by 3/31...and in fact could be somewhat higher. The 6.2M number has held pretty firm until today, but now we're entering the real crunchtime as we head into the final week--that number could start jumping around quite a bit.
If I am correct about 5.5M today, however, reaching 7M by 3/31 would be pretty much a pipe dream, as QHPs would have to shoot up to over 187,500 per day for the entire final week. I noted last week that 100K - 150K is conceivable for a few days based on California hitting 30K in a single day on 12/23...but it's been another week with the average appearing to hold steady at around 60,000/day, and sustaining 187K for 8 days straight just seems pretty implausible. 6.5 million, on the other hand, would "only" require 125K/day for 8 days straight...which, while also pretty implausible, isn't too crazy.
On a related note, I do figure that I've earned the right to archive my accuracy record a bit at this point, so I've added a permanent link to my Greatest Hits to the site, right under the March Projection link. Each projection is in turn linked to the earliest source I could find containing my projection (this was more difficult than you'd think, since I wasn't really making a big deal out of the estimates until the past month or so).
This article contains a breakdown between "strict expansion" (30,000) and "bulk transfers" (51,000), modified from the 13,000 and 55,000 prior estimates (not sure what happened to the other 4,000 who were listed as being transferred from IowaCare previously). Still a net gain of 13,000 people.
In addition, state officials say about 81,000 Iowans have enrolled in the new Iowa Health and Wellness Plan or Marketplace Choice Plan, which are Iowa’s versions of an expanded Medicaid program.
About 51,000 of those people used to have limited coverage from IowaCare, a program that ended Dec. 31.
Interestingly, there's even a reference to a specific "woodworker" figure
In February, 403,609 people were enrolled in the program. That represented an increase of 0.5 percent from the 401,582 who were in the program in February 2013.
When I first read this article submitted by contributor Maurice H., I was pretty concerned, as it made it sound like Arizona's exchange QHP total was only around perhaps 60,100 as of March 18 (the artilce was posted on the 19th):
Final numbers for Arizona enrollment will not be available for a few weeks, but more than 80,000 Arizonans have enrolled in Medicaid and more than 60,000 have enrolled in private health care plans through the site, said Herb K. Schultz, regional director of the Health and Human Services Department.
This concerned me because Arizona already had 57,611 QHPs as of March 1st...and had 43,495 on February 1st. That means that AZ's February average was 504/day.
If the 3/18 number was only around 60,100, that would mean they were only at 2,489 for March, or only 146/day…a 71% plummet from February.
Nice find out of South Dakota from contributor Maurice H.; SD was at 6,765 on 3/01. This represents only an 8% increase over February's rate in March so far, although I'm not sure how much "just over 8K" is or what date that number runs through (I'm assuming 3/20).
Just over 8,000 people have signed up for health care coverage in South Dakota. Those signing up in the last week will also need to pay their first month's premium to get coverage. But those premiums may be lower than people expect.
"In the state of South Dakota about 90 percent of the people purchasing insurance are getting subsidies from the federal government," Krystolpolski said.
Excellent news out of West Virginia: Medicaid expansion has increased yet again, from 87,000 to 98,000 residents. This is particularly impressive considering that the total number of people in WV who are eligible for Medicaid post-expansion is about 143,000, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
Doris Selko, Southern Regional coordinator for the West Virginians for Affordable Health Care, said over 98,000 residents had enrolled in the Medicaid expansion by March 15 and an estimated 105,000 are expected to be enrolled by the end of the month.
Selko said three southern counties — Nicholas, Summers and Wyoming — have all enrolled over 100 percent of the anticipated enrollment numbers, and Raleigh County has enrolled 99 percent.
Tavenner’s involvement made a difference in other ways, too. Beginning this summer, Mississippi will have one of the nation’s few state-run small-business exchanges. Federal officials approved the request even though Chaney doesn’t have the support of Gov. Phil Bryant, a Republican who doesn’t want anything to do with the law. Bryant didn’t expand Medicaid and shunned creating a state insurance exchange, which he called a portal to a “massive and unaffordable” new federal entitlement.
In addition to the 15 state-run exchange SHOP programs (only 12 of which are actually operational right now), Utah and New Mexico are actually running their own SHOP exchanges; this means that Mississippi will join them.
Good gravy. 391,000 people in North Carolina?? They were only at 200,546 as of 3/01. Even if you assume this number includes Medicaid enrollments, that's still only another 55,691 as of 3/01...and NC is not an expansion state. Assuming that 391K includes both...and assuming the same 78/22 split between the two...that still suggests that QHPs have gone up to around 305,000, a 105,115 increase over the end of February, and over 3.8x the February daily rate.
While waiting to see whether I was right about the national exchange-based QHP total hitting the 5.5M mark yesterday (and bear in mind that there's no guarantee that HHS will make an announcement about it even if I was correct; they didn't do so for 3.5M or 4.5M...I just figure that they will since it's a logical milestone and would be a nice momentum-building PR move going into the final stretch), I just wanted to call attention to this article from yesterday out of KTVU/Fox in California:
This article contains a breakdown between "strict expansion" (30,000) and "bulk transfers" (51,000), modified from the 13,000 and 55,000 prior estimates (not sure what happened to the 
When I first read this article submitted by contributor Maurice H., I was pretty concerned, as it made it sound like Arizona's exchange QHP total was only around perhaps 60,100 as of March 18 (the artilce was posted on the 19th):
Nice find out of South Dakota from contributor Maurice H.; SD was at 6,765 on 3/01. This represents only an 8% increase over February's rate in March so far, although I'm not sure how much "just over 8K" is or what date that number runs through (I'm assuming 3/20).
Excellent news out of West Virginia: Medicaid expansion has increased yet again, from 87,000 to 98,000 residents. This is particularly impressive considering that the total number of people in WV who are eligible for Medicaid post-expansion is about 143,000, according to the 
