Massachusetts: 252.5K QHPs thru 12/28; raising my projection to 260K

I just noted this morning that Rhode Island's enrollment numbers for 2017 are coming up significantly short of not only my own admittedly unrealistic hopes (I was hoping RI would buck the national trend and beef up enrollment by 15% this year), but is likely to actually come up lower than last year's 33.9K by several thousand people.

Fortunately, the opposite is proving to be the case in Massachusetts:

Through yesterday, we had 240,745 enrolled in January 2017 coverage...these are people who paid their bill. There are an additional 11,803 people who selected a plan but haven't paid for it yet. That's a total of 252,548.

That's, 252,548 QHP selections as of 12/28/16, of which over 95% have actually paid their first monthly premium (well above the 90% payment national average).

For comparison, last year Massachusetts' final open enrollment tally was 213,883 as of 2/01/16...which means that not only are they already 12.7% ahead of my personal projections for 2017 (224,000), they're actually a whopping 18% ahead of last year's total!

Even more impressive is the "thru date" comparison: As of 12/28 last year, MA had 196,647 QHP selections, so they're 28.4% ahead of that on the same day this year. They went on to add another 8.8% to that by the end of January; if they're able to pull that off again this year, they could conceivably hit as high as 275K, although that's highly unlikely. Instead, I'm gonna bump up my personal projection to around 260,000 even.