ACA breaks 1.6 MIL (maybe); broken out by Exchange/Medicaid

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

Thanks to the latest eyebrow-raising numbers out of California, the ObamacareSignups.nettally--including Medicaid expansion--now stands at 1,622,521    .

I should note that the big numbers from both California and New York are rather fuzzy, because they're very large but also don't give any real breakdown. The other day Rep. Capps of CA-24 claimed California has 600,000 added to Medicaid and 125,000 applications on the exchanges; today CoveredCA claims 227,000 applications...but doesn't break this out, so that could be a major issue. By the same token, NY supposedly has 200,000 completed applications...and another source claims 27,000 of these are Medicaid. I'm fairly certain that the breakdown is actually more like 140K Medicaid to 60K Exchanges, but I can't be sure for now.

If you were to remove both California and New York from the totals completely, they would both drop dramatically, to around 573,000 combined, so this is a pretty important thing to sort out.

It's important to understand that sources and methodology for this sort of tracking is going to vary widely, depending on what exactly it is that you're trying to track (as well as the source, of course). In my case, yes, I'm including Medicaid expansion signups, because ultimately, what matters is people actually getting decent medical care at an affordable price.

In addition, I've chosen to include applications for healthcare plans, even if they haven't actually been enrolled yet. You could certainly argue that I shouldn't count it, but frankly, so many of the articles/sources I'm using fail to make that distinction either that I grew tired of trying to separate the wheat from the chaff.