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 reaction to Mr. Silver's relaunched 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).

Here's how I've done so far:

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.

(sigh) OK, at this point I guess there's no point in even continuing these "no sleep 'til..." posts.

First, out of Mississippi, of all states, comes this:

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.

The number is given in a negative context, but NM is up to 18,691 from 15,012 as of March 1st...263/day, up nearly 2.2x from February's 121/day:

As of March 15, 18,691 New Mexico residents had enrolled in the exchange, Ezekiel said. After already adjusting enrollment expectations for 2014 downward from 83,000 to 50,000 because of problems with the federalhealthcare.gov portal, the state is struggling to reach its target.

Nice find by deaconblues: OH Sen. Sherrod Brown was pushing people to enroll at an event on Thursday. His office had a press release posted on the site on the same day, so I presume that the 97K figure was as of Wednesday at the latest.

More than 5 million Americans, 97,000 in Ohio, have entered the health insurance marketplace, but more than 115,000 Ohioans are eligible to enroll with financial assistance.

This gives Ohio a daily QHP average of 1,004 in March, up 50% over the February rate of 672.

Really just a clarification from yesterday more than anything; up from 35,475 to 35,610 (up 135) and from 94,329 to 95,867 (up 1,538).

To date, MNsure has enrolled 35,610 in a Qualified Health Plan, 26,297 in MinnesotaCare and 69,570 in Medical Assistance.