CO Medicaid reduced; 3.1M sub26ers affirmed; Site Housekeeping

It looks like my previous source for Colorado's Medicaid Expansion tally (114,192) was mistaking applications for actual enrollments. This number has been reduced by 27,760 as of 12/31/13.

In addition, in a previous entry I mentioned a study by the Commonwealth Fund from earlier this year which claimed that the correct number of "Under 26'ers" on their parent's plans thanks to the ACA is actually closer to 7.8 million instead of the 3.1 million figure that I've been using. However, I've been reluctant to switch to that figure since a) it's much larger and b) the HHS itself is only using the 3.1 million number. Today I found out why this is the case; contributor jdld provided a link to this report on the HHS website which states:

There are 29.7 million adults in this age group, as of the most recent Census data (see Footnote 6). There was a 10.4% increase in insured young adults (64.4% to 74.8%) from Q3 2010 to Q4 2011 (Table 8). 10.4% of 29.7 million is 3.1 million young adults...

A recent survey from the Commonwealth Fund found that 6.6 million young adults who have enrolled in their parents’ health plans since November 2010 were unlikely to have been eligible for those plans before the Affordable Care Act. This number exceeds our calculation because it includes some individuals who were already insured, often through their own private coverage.

The HHS report is from June 19, 2012, which means that the 6.6 million Commonwealth Fund report it's referring to was from spring 2012. The 7.8 million number comes from a survey done over a year later, in August 2013. This suggest an 18% increase in "sub-26ers" since the original report, which would make the 3.1M figure closer to 3.7 million. However, since the HHS Dept. is still sticking with 3.1 million and the 18% increase is speculative on my part, I'll leave it at 3.1M for now.

Finally, I just wanted to note some restructuring of the spreadsheet layout. The biggest visual challenge is wrestling the spreadsheet into a narrower format (preferably so it'll fit within an 1,152px-wide display). At the same time, I've recently added columns for a 3rd type of ACA enrollment: Direct (off-exchange) policies. Both of these require getting rid of the wide "Notes" column at the right side.

Fortunately, now that I'm posting detailed information for the updates here in the blog, I no longer need the Notes column anyway. Instead, I've added "Thru Date" columns for all 3 enrollment types (the most commonly-posted notes); everything else will be gradually moved over here to the blog.

Finally, as you can see above, I'm trying to standardize the actual State Update entries. This means that going forward every state will have it's own individual blog post instead of lumping them all together into one.