REMINDER: HC.gov's next "weekly snapshot" should total around 6.59M (as of 01/02/15)

Lost in the shuffle of the first monthly HHS report (which only ran through 12/15 and was missing gobs of data) was their weekly snapshot report, which was released the same day. It runs through 12/26, but isn't broken out by state, of course, and most importantly only includes QHP selections for the 37 states run through HC.gov.

I was expecting the number to drop substantially last week, of course, since the January coverage deadine has passed and the vast bulk of renewals (active + automatic) were already baked into the prior week's report. I figured that we'd be looking at roughly 30K/day on HC.gov until around January 10th, when it should start to spike again...or around 210K for the week.

Instead, I was surprised at how much it dropped last week--only 96,000 more QHPs added.

Then I slapped my forehead: The 20th - 26th included 2 rather important days: Christmas Eve and Day. For comparison, in Massachusetts specifically, enrollments on Thanksgiving Day plummeted to around 15% of the daily average.

Assuming a similar drop-off for those 2 days--likely lower still given the nature of the holiday--the weekly QHP selections should have been around 30% lower than I was expecting (around 21K/day). However, it was actually even lower than that: Around 14K/day, which I admit surprised me a bit.

I think it's safe to assume that the current week (12/27 - 01/02) should follow a similar path, given New Year's Eve and Day being included, so I'll assume roughly 100K more being added this week, for a total of 6.59 million via HC.gov as of tonight.

I'm still expecting things to pick up considerably over the next week or so (perhaps 20K/day through around 1/10, then spiking somewhat through the 15th), but I'm walking back my 1/15 totals (both via HC.gov and nationally) a bit to 7.12 million and 9.5 million respectively.

I'm keeping my 2/15 grand total estimates (9.4M via HC.gov, 12.5M total) the same for now, however; I just think it'll be a bit more back-loaded than I did earlier, that's all.

The Graph has been modified accordingly.

The other thing to keep an eye on when the weekly report comes out on Wednesday (Jan. 7th) will be how many total QHP applications there are. Last week there were around 6.5 million selections, but 8.2 million applications, meaning that about 1.7 million people had set up accounts and plugged in all of their information, but hadn't actually selected a plan as of yet.