My Back-of-the-Envelope Projection for 4/15: 900K More QHPs for 8M Even (UPDATED x2)

This is more of an updated/simplified version of my post from a couple of days ago. As I said, I'm not going to set up an elaborate spreadsheet and try to micromanage the projection data for the next 10 days the way I did during the regular enrollment period. Instead, I'm just going with a lazier, more general estimate: Based partly on the California data given by Peter Lee (500K partly done applications in under the 3/31 wire, half of which are likely Medicaid-bound), I'm figuring that total exchange QHP enrollments gonna end up somewhere around 900K total, for a nice round 8M by the end of April 15th. Perhaps a little higher (1M even?).*

As always, I'll be more than happy to be proven wrong, as long as I've undershot the mark :)

This breaks down to around 60K per day x 15 days, which is what I'll be tacking onto the Spreadsheet & Graph until the actual total comes out.

If I'm way off, so be it; precise projections were never supposed to be part of this project in the first place anyway...my goal was to track the data as it comes in, not try to predict the data. That was just sort of a lark which I happened to end up being pretty good at doing.

UPDATE: I've been informed by Steve Ciccarelli in the comments that White House Sr. Advisor Dan Pfeiffer mentioned an additional 200K QHP enrollments "this week" on Face the Nation this morning.

Assuming "this week" referred to Tuesday - Saturday and included both Federal and all State exchanges, that would be around 40K/day. However, I'm also assuming that there will be one more "mini-surge" next weekend and into Tuesday, so I'm sticking with my 60K/day overall estimate (plus, it's possible that he meant 200K on the Federal exchange alone, which would suggest about 235K nationally, or 47K/day).

*UPDATE x2: (sigh) Well, ok. Assuming 40K x 11 days, and assuming the 200K referred to by Pfeiffer includes state exchanges, that's 440K. If it doubles to 80K for the last 4 days (Sat -Tue), that's another 320K, for a total of 760K. Assuming that the total as of 3/31 was a bit more than 7.1M...say, 7.14M, that's 7.9M even.

So, let's call it around 7.8 - 7.9M total if Pfeiffer was including state exchanges, and 7.9 - 8.0M total if he wasn't.

Of course, Oregon still has full enrollment through April 30th, and Nevada has extended their "started by 3/31" policy all the way out to May 30th, so there could be another, what, 10K or so more straggler exchange QHPs which come in after the 15th? (Not including Native Americans, Major Life Events, SHOP QHPs or Medicaid, none of which have deadlines, that is).

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