Final HC.gov #ACATaxTime: 147K QHPs; grand total: 12.0M CONFIRMED

Thanks to Margot Sanger-Katz for the heads up.

After all the fuss and bother made over the #ACATaxTime Special Enrollment Period by myself and others, the final number of QHP selections was announced in the most understated way possible:

From March 15 to April 30, 147,000 consumers signed up for coverage through http://t.co/eTfU7hSMWR using the tax special enrollment period.

— HealthCare.gov (@HealthCareGov) May 19, 2015

No splashy press release, charts or graphs; just a simple number. In the end, while it was far lower than my original spitball take (600K+), it was also higher than my revised estimate of 135K - 140K.

UPDATE: Hold the phone! I just realized that the 147K number only includes HC.gov enrollees! When you add in at least 33,000 tax SEP-specific enrollees out of California, 4,800 or so from Washington state and 1,429 in Connecticut, that's around 186,000. Throw in whatever other tax SEP-specific enrollees there were in the other 8 states which haven't reported/broken them out, that should add up to around 200,000 #ACATaxTime-specific enrollments nationally.

Unfortunately, there's still no state-by-state breakout of today's HC.gov number. However, combined with the other off-season/tax SEP numbers reported from (most) of the state exchanges, this (including today's Minnesota update of 64K QHPs) does bring the grand total number of confirmed 2015 QHP selections up to exactly: 11,995,315.

Technically speaking, they're still about 5,000 QHPs shy of the 12 million mark, but give me a break; this number doesn't include normal Off-Season Enrollments (via life changes) in nearly every state since 2/22 or the tax season SEP enrollments from a half-dozen state-based exchanges.

Therefore, it's quite safe to call it:

• 2015 ACA Exchange-based QHP Selections have officially broken the 12.0 million mark, with over 9.0 million coming from HealthCare.Gov.

UPDATE x2: A few days after I posted this, some additional data came out which made it truly official: 12,024,658 QHP selections have been verified for 2015.

Of course, when you throw in the missing tax season SEP / off-season enrollments, the actual total should be closer to 12.4 million or higher, and should finally reach my personal Open Enrollment Period target of 12.5 million by the end of May.

After that (assuming the King v. Burwell SCOTUS decision doesn't screw everything up), I'm estimating that total 2015 exchange-based QHP selections should hit 13 million by around the end of July and 13.5 million in early October, topping off at 13.7 million by the end of November.

Here's the update to The Graph, with both the new HC.gov and MNsure numbers added in (as always, click below for the full-sized version):