California: 1.476M QHPs thru 1/18? (290K new enrollees)

OK, so I've just received word that Covered California has added exactly 290,137 new QHP enrollees as of January 18th.

This compares with the 238K new enrollees as of January 2nd, so that's around 52,000 additional people from 1/03 - 1/18, or 3,466 per day.

The official ASPE report, which ran through 12/27/15 for California, had their tally at 1,411,664, of which 84% were re-enrollees from 2015, which should be around 1.186 million.

Add 290K to that and you're up to roughly 1.476 million people.

My official target for California is 1.80 million, so CoveredCA has reached 82% of where I was expecting them to be by now...which is right in line with where I think things stand nationally.

I haven't seen an official press release yet, however, and it's conceivable that the "renewal" number will drop if some cancelled renewals are purged, but otherwise things are looking pretty good in the Golden State.

Assuming I have these numbers correct, they'd have to add another 324K over the remaining 13 days, or nearly 25K/day, which seems, um, unlikely, to put it mildly.

On the other hand, their own official projection is "295K - 450K new enrollees, plus however many renewals they get"...so by that standard, I guess they've already hit their low-end internal projection, technically speaking...

In order to hit the high end, they'll have to add another 160K, or 12.3K/day, which seems more reasonable (but still a reach). That would bring their total number up to 1.636 million.