District of Columbia: DC Health Link (sort of) reports 2020 Open Enrollment up 10%...or down 4%.

Back in early January I noted that the DC Health Link had reported having 18,611 people enrolled in ACA individual market policies as of January 5th. DC's official deadline wasn't until January 31st, however, and even then they bumped it out by an additional five days (thru January 5th).

Unfortunately, they haven't issued an official final enrollment report yet, but I've been able to get the top-line numbers from an audio recording of their monthly executive board meeting on February 12th:

If you read through the transcript carefully, it boils down to this:

• 2019 Open Enrollment Period: 20,776 individual market QHP selections
• 2020 Open Enrollment Period: 19,932 individual market QHP selections
• That's a drop of around 4.1% year over year

However, the official total for the 2019 Open Enrollment Period as reported by CMS as only 18,035 QHP selections due to some last-minute clerical error corrections and/or purging of last-minute cancellations.

So...that either means that DC's final enrollment total is up over 10% (which I find difficult to believe) or, assuming a similar "purge/cleanup" ratio, that it's down ~4% to around 17,300 or so.

I'll have to see what the DC Health Link reports, and even then it may not match up with the official national CMS 2020 Open Enrollment Period report which is expected sometime in March or early April.

For the moment, I'm going to err on the side of caution and call it 17,300. If the official total ends up higher, great!