Sticking My Neck Out: 6M Exchange QHPs Announced Today

OK, I'm probably gonna go down in flames for this, but this "50K Households Started Applications Yesterday" tweet from Covered California keeps coming to mind.

50,000 households started #CoveredCA health insurance applications yesterday - our highest number yet.

— Covered California (@CoveredCA) March 26, 2014

I'm gonna go for it and predict an announcement later today that the 6 million exchange QHP milestone has been hit.

(to clarify: if they announce it today, it probably actually crossed 6M sometime last night or early this morning)

I'm leaving the 3/31 projection as 6.39M for the moment, but will update this (or not) depending on whether I'm correct about a 6M announcement (or not).

UPDATE: A contributor just sent me a link to this article from The Hill from yesterday, which makes me feel much better about making the 6M Announced Today projection:

The administration said 5.2 million people had selected a plan through the middle of March and has long expected a flood of enrollees to close out the period. If the White House can hit the Congressional Budget Office’s reduced forecast of 6 million enrollees, which was reduced from 7 million after the website malfunctioned for two months, that could go a long way to repairing public and political perception of the law.

For heaven's sake. If I had read that article an hour ago I wouldn't have been so nervous about this blog entry. "The middle of March" presumably means around the 16th or 17th, when I had the number pegged at around 5.09 million...which means it was actually about 100K higher than I thought.

At around 70K/day+, that automatically moves the 6M milestone up about a day and a half...from Friday or Saturday to Wednesday or Thursday...as in, yesterday or today, as I just said. :)

This also makes it far more likely that my 79K/day projection for the current week is accurate as well.