ObamacareSignups.net: Apps/Signups Top 518,000! (Help Still Needed)

NOTE: This was originally posted over at Daily Kos. I've since ported it over here for archival purposes.

Last night's big news was the Obama administration finally releasing their first official numbers on ACA exchange signups; they stated that "more than 476,000 health insurance applications have been filed through federal and state exchanges".

On the one hand, that's still a pretty nebulous figure--"Applications Filed" doesn't necessarily equal "People Actually Signed Up". On the other hand, many of those applications are likely for more than one person (households), so the number could be 2-3 times that figure. I also find it noteworthy that the 476,000 figure is remarkably close to my own rough tally (450,000) from just one day earlier, which I think is pretty cool!

Anyway, if you go to ObamacareSignups.net, you'll see that my own current tally now sits at over a half a million. The updates are mostly due to this story from CNN, which states that New York has 134,000 signed up and Kentucky and Washington State have 45,000 each (although another reliable local source out of Spokane pegs the Washington number at 62,000, so I'm going with that for now).

Anyway, to keep my tally going and up to date, I'm STILL looking for people to assist by taking on one or more states.

So far, I have Oregon, Washington State, Maryland, Colorado, California and Nevada covered by
rsmpdx, dadadata, MotherShipper, ybruti andCJB respectively.

Update: rugbymom has offered to cover Rhode Island.

Here's the other states I need covered; If you're interested in assisting, email me at cgaba (at) brainwrap (dot) com, thanks!

--Connecticut
--District of Columbia
--Hawaii
--Kentucky
--Massachusetts
--Minnesota
--New York
--Vermont

I've made some significant updates to both the spreadsheet and the figures, including:

--I've taken ownership of the spreadsheet by adding "by brainwrap" to the site (I debated about whether to do this or not, but screw it)

--I've added links to 3 other sources which are trying to track the number of signups, although all of them have lower numbers than I list: 50,000 (Daily Briefing), 156,000 (Aaron Strauss), 185,000 (Sarah Kliff's WonkBlog). It really depends on what you (or the state, or the media source) define as "applied", "approved", "enrolled" or "signed up". It also depends on whether you include Medicaid expansion or not (in my case, I'm doing so, which no doubt explains much of the higher total).

--Maryland has released their latest tally (PDF), which includes both exchange signups as well as Medicaid expansion numbers...and now sits at over 84,000 people with health coverage!

--Here's a great article that explains the situation with the state-run websites, which have fared far better than the disasterous Healthcare.gov

Anyway, as of this morning, my tally sits at 518,627. Check it out at:

ObamacareSignups.net