Oh yeah...8 states have *already* surpassed last year's FINAL OEP enrollment total.

I included so much data wonkery in my last Open Enrollment Period data breakout that I decided to split one more item onto its own entry.

As I noted in the prior entry, QHP enrollment is running ahead of last year so far in 45 states so far, with it running more than 50% higher in over a dozen of them and more than twice as high in Mississippi.

Another way of looking at this is to compare the confirmed current QHP enrollment in every state as of the most recent data (12/02/23 for HC.gov states; 11/25/23 for SBM states) against the final total QHP enrollment as of the end of the 2023 Open Enrollment Period.

This is obviously isn't a fair comparison since there's still a full 40 days left for people to enroll and because auto-renewals still have to be added to the federal exchange states. However, it's still interesting to take a look.

For the SBM states, I've included their auto-renewals as reported in either the CMS snapshot report or, in a few cases, even more recent combined enrollment data from the SBMs themselves.

When I plug that data in and compare it to the final 2023 OEP numbers, here's what it looks like as of today:

There's 8 states, led by New Mexico, which have already exceeded their 2023 OEP totals when auto-renewals are included. This is admittedly a bit misleading since those auto-renewal numbers tend to shrink a bit over time as auto-renewed enrollees either a) cancel their renewals entirely or b) actively switch to a different plan than the one they were automatically renewed in (which means they still get counted as an enrollee, just not as an auto-renewed enrollee).

Even so, it's still pretty impressive. This also uncovers the truth about Virginia's performance--they're showing up as being down 63% according to the official CMS snapshot report, but with auto-renewals added they're actually already running 5.5% ahead of last year's final tally.

As for the FFM states, Mississippi is, once again, showing impressive year over year growth--they're only 27% behind their 2023 OEP total even without auto-renewals added to the mix.

Hawaii is the worst-performing of the FFM states, down 69% from last year's total, although again, without the auto-renewals included this doesn't tell us much; it's possible that Hawaiians are just more likely to "let it ride" and allow themselves to be auto-renewed from year to year. I'll have to check against prior years data to see if that's the case, however.