Reminder: Exchange QHPs should hit 5.5M sometime today
Sun, 03/23/2014 - 4:10pm
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:
| Private QHPs: Total thru the end of December | ||
| My Projection (made on 12/25) | 2,100,000 | 98.24% accurate |
| Actual HHS Figure (released on 1/13) | 2,137,630 | |
| Medicaid/CHIP: Total thru the end of December | ||
| My Projection (made on 1/21) | 6,320,000 | over 99% accurate |
| Actual CMS Figure (released on 1/22) | "more than 6.3M" | |
| Private QHPs: Total thru the end of January | ||
| My Projection (made on 2/07) | 3,300,000 | 99.98% accurate |
| Actual HHS Figure (released on 2/12) | 3,299,492 | |
| Private QHPs: Percent Paid | ||
| My Estimate (made on 2/13 at 10 AM) | 75-80% |
basically the same |
| New York Times (published on 2/13 at 5 PM) | 75-80% | |
| Private QHPs: Total thru Feb. 19 | ||
| My Projection (based on chart, 2/19) | 3,860,000 | over 95% accurate |
| President Obama (stated on 2/20) | "close to 4M" | |
| Private QHPs: Total thru Feb. 24 | ||
| My Projection, (made on 2/25 at 3:48pm) | 4,013,762 | 99.66% accurate |
| Actual HHS (released on 2/25 at 5:59pm) | 4,000,000 | |
| Private QHPs: Total thru the end of February | ||
| My Projection (made on 3/01) | 4,202,000 | 99.05% accurate |
| Actual HHS Figure (released on 3/13) | 4,242,325 | |
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California Hitting 1 Million Private QHP Enrollments: On March 8th I projected CA hitting 1M on March 11th or 12th. However, I didn't realize at the time how ugly CoveredCA's mid-February outage had been. Once I realized this, I revised my projection to sometime over that weekend instead; sure enough, they crossed the 1M mark on Friday the 14th. |
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National Exchange QHP Enrollments hitting 5 Million: I originally projected total exchange QHPs to hit 5M on Tuesday, March 18th. In the mid-afternoon on Monday, March 17th I realized that since CA has been averaging around 20% of the total QHPs all along, once they hit 1M, the national tally should hit around 5M at right around the same time, so I moved my 5M estimate up one day (actually, I suspected that they hit their milestone over the weekend just as CA did, but weren't going to announce it publicly until the next day). Sure enough, a few hours later on Monday the HHS Dept. made the 5M announcement. |
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