I included the 80K in 4 days info yesterday, but didn't realize the implications of the second sentence until a commentor pointed it out:
The Covered California exchange said sign-ups have been building throughout the week with about 80,000 people picking a health plan Monday through Thursday. An additional 150,000 households created an online account and started the shopping process in the last three days, officials said.
That's 50,000 households--not individuals--PER DAY who JUST ceated an account for 3 days straight.
Pretty sure most of those are actually enrolling even as I type this.
I think this final weekend surge is going to be MUCH larger than even I've been projecting.
Gotta run for the moment, but I'm going ahead and calling it 6.7 million exchange-based QHPs as of now.
Looks like the 39K on Monday & Tuesday continued at the same pace all week...supporting my "California 20%" rule (20K in CA = 100K nationally):
SACRAMENTO (AP) — California is seeing a late surge in the number of people signing up for healthinsurance coverage ahead of next week’s deadline – and state officials are encouraging more people to apply.
The state already reported surpassing 1 million enrollees. But Covered California Executive Director Peter Lee said Friday that another 80,000 people enrolled in the past four days alone.
20,000 per day in California is 4x the rate they hit in February.
I'm pretty sure California has now broken 1.2 million all by itself (which makes sense if the 20% rule holds...1.2M = 20% of 6M...)
Based on this and the Oregon entry, I'm increasing my projection from 6.54M to 6.58M as of 3/31.
Blammo. Remember how I noted that back in December, California managed to hit 30K exchange QHPs in a single day, and 20K/day for several other days between Christmas and New Year's Eve?
The site — the main portal for insurance marketplaces in 36 states — drew 1.2 million visitors Tuesday and 1.1 million visitors Monday, according to the administration.
Over the same period, call centers received more than 500,000 calls. California's state-run health insurance exchange reported a similar surge in interest, with nearly 40,000 people picking a health plan Monday and Tuesday.
Now, this is awesome news, as it suggests a national rate of around 100K/day (CA has averaged around 20% of the national QHP enrollments all along).
However, it also poses a slight dilemma for me, since there's an 8 day gap between the existing March data (03/02 - 03/15) and these 2 days (03/24 - 03/25).
Oregonians now have an additional month to apply for private health insurance. New deadline to apply is April 30. The Oregon Insurance Division and Cover Oregon urge people to apply now to get coverage as soon as possible and avoid potential end-of-month rush.
While waiting to see whether I was right about the national exchange-based QHP total hitting the 5.5M mark yesterday (and bear in mind that there's no guarantee that HHS will make an announcement about it even if I was correct; they didn't do so for 3.5M or 4.5M...I just figure that they will since it's a logical milestone and would be a nice momentum-building PR move going into the final stretch), I just wanted to call attention to this article from yesterday out of KTVU/Fox in California:
SAN FRANCISCO — One week from Monday is the open enrollment deadline for Covered California. The insurance exchange hit the one million mark for sign-ups last week, and is expecting about 20,000 people a day to sign up in the final push.
I've already contacted the reporter who wrote the story to make absolutely certain this doesn't include Medicaid enrollees, but the context makes me pretty sure they're talking about exchange QHPs only. Also, "expecting" 20K/day doesn't necessarily mean they've already ramped up to that; it could just mean that they're preparing for that volume just in case.
Contributor Ruth 37 sent a link to this open letter from Peter Lee from 2 days ago, regarding California's 1M QHP milestone and what CoveredCA's plans are going forward.
The number of people who have picked a Covered California health insurance plan now tops 1 million. This is an amazing accomplishment, and it means that with two weeks to go we have exceeded the highest “enhanced forecast” for the entire open-enrollment period. The health insurance companies report that more than 85 percent of those who have enrolled are paying their premium and getting coverage. That means 850,000 Californians are on their way to coverage through Covered California, which surpasses the top projection of 830,000....
There we go; I originally projected California to hit 1M last Tuesday or Wednesday, but didn't realize at the time just how bad the mid-February outage had hit the exchange. It ended up taking them 2 extra days to hit the 1M mark (Friday night). Fortunately, it looks like they've bounced back nicely:
Covered California’s enrollment reached the 1-million mark late Friday. By the end of Saturday, enrollment reached 1,018,315 in the health care exchange marketplace. The figure represents the number of people applying for coverage and selecting insurance plans for themselves and their family members through the exchange.
In addition, California's NEW Medicaid enrollee numbers continue to skyrocket, up from 877K (exchange) / 652K (bulk transfers/other) at the end of January to a whopping 1.136 Million + 968,500 = 2,104,500 total (!)
The wording of the 1.136M Medicaid number specifies that this is a combination of NEW enrollees as well as "ongoing caseload activity", which sounds to me like people who enrolled a few months earlier but are still having paperwork issues. Either way, it sounds clear to me that these are not "renewals (aka rederminations)".
The February HHS Report included some especially confusing numbers out of the two largest state-run exchanges, California and New York, as both seemed shockingly low given how successful they both seemed to be doing in the first half of the month.
In the case of California, they were kicking serious ass in the first half of February, averaging around 7,200 QHP enrollments per day. Unfortunately, a few days later the CoveredCA exchange was hit with a very nasty technical problem which brought things to a standstill for not the 3 days that I thought, but 5 days. Result? The daily average dropped from 7,200/day in the first half to only 2,800/day for the second half of the month:
Enrollment in Obamacare coverage slowed last month in California, hurt by a recent website outage.
New federal data show 868,936 Californians signed up for health insurance in the state's exchange through March 1.
UPDATE: On the down side, I was off by 4% this time around.
On the up side, I UNDERESTIMATED:
Actual Feb. enrollments: 942,833, for a total of 4,242,325 thru 3/01/14.
Sarah Kliff at Vox just announced that the February HHS report is expected to be released today at around 4:00pm. A few items in anticipation of that:
As I've noted several times, I'm projecting the report to total around 902,000 exchange-based private QHP enrollments for the month of February (technically 2/02 - 3/01)
If accurate, this would bring the cumulative total of exchange-based private QHP enrollments to 4.202 million (from 10/1/13 - 3/01/14)
From the data I have, the average daily enrollment rate in February was almost identical to that of January, which had about 1.146 million QHP enrollments. HOWEVER, the January report included five weeks of data (12/28 - 2/01), while the February report will only include four weeks (2/02 - 3/01). Therefore, even at the same daily average, it'll be about 20% lower no matter what.
Don't be surprised if Peter Lee of CoveredCA decides to steal some thunder by announcing that California has enrolled 1,000,000 QHPs all by itself either today or tomorrow. However, that would include the past 10 days, while the HHS number will only run thru 3/01.
If you want to get REALLY specific, call it 902,800 and 4,202,292.
I've been dead-on target 6 times in a row without hyping up my projections beforehand. This time I am hyping myself up beforehand, so I'll probably be way off...but as long as I've UNDERestimated the tally, I'll be perfectly fine with that...
The report will be released in about 5 minutes, but my kid gets home from school in about 10, so it'll be a good 20 minutes before I can really post anything. Feel free to follow Sarah Kliff of Vox in the meantime!
While waiting to see whether I was right about the national exchange-based QHP total hitting the 5.5M mark yesterday (and bear in mind that there's no guarantee that HHS will make an announcement about it even if I was correct; they didn't do so for 3.5M or 4.5M...I just figure that they will since it's a logical milestone and would be a nice momentum-building PR move going into the final stretch), I just wanted to call attention to this article from yesterday out of KTVU/Fox in California:
There we go; I originally projected California to hit 1M last Tuesday or Wednesday, but didn't realize at the time just how bad the mid-February outage had hit the exchange. It ended up taking them 2 extra days to hit the 1M mark (Friday night). Fortunately, it looks like they've bounced back nicely:
