Last night, AlexcSinger posted this diary quoting the Wall Street Journal as claiming that:
So far, private health plans have received enrollment data for 40,000 to 50,000 users of the federal marketplace, the people familiar with the figures said.
The figure of 40,000 to 50,000 doesn't include people in the 36 states who used the federal website to learn they qualify for Medicaid, a federal-state health program for low-income people. Medicaid is being expanded in many of the 36 states.
This seems like an appropriate place to
take another look at my own diary from last week below the fold:
As I noted in the diary:
It will be very interesting to see just how close--or completely dead wrong--my own figures are at ObamacareSignups.net
As of this morning, the Week 6 Tally stands at:
373,196 Exchange Applications/Enrollments and
588,948 Medicaid/SCHIP Expansion Enrollments.
...There are two other legitimate/serious ACA-tracking sources that I've found to be pretty reliable:
--EnrollMaven.com is an openly anti-Obamacare outfit. As such, they're using an extremely strict definition of what "counts": No Medicaid, no SCHIP, no Applications, and they aren't even including the Catastrophic or, weirdly, Platinum plans (even though those are options on the paid-for exchanges). They're only counting people who are actually fully signed up/enrolled (and presumably paying) for Gold, Silver or Bronze plans through the exchanges.
With all of the above caveats, their number as of this morning is only 43,359.
--The Advisory Board Company, on the other hand, doesn't include Medicaid but does claim to break out the Exchange numbers by both Applications and Enrollments.
They put the numbers at 195,000 enrollments out of 485,000 applications.
...
So, it seems to me that the official enrollment numbers that Sebelius announces will be somewhere between 40,000 - 400,000 for the first month.
If it's towards the low end, that sucks...but remember that as long as those 400,000 applications are legitimate, complete and aren't accidentally deleted in a database glitch (or whatever), they will be processed soon.
Just keep this in mind and brace yourselves for the inevitable media/GOP outrage over the puny initial numbers.
Another key point: I assume Sebelius' numbers will ONLY be for Oct 1 - 31 and will likely NOT include anything from November.
Finally, remember that in Massachusetts, hardly anyone signed up the first few weeks, but there was a massive spike in enrollments very close to the deadline (in this case, 12/15 would be the key date, since that's the deadline for having coverage starting on 1/1/14).
...
ObamacareSignups.net
I should note that to their credit, EnrollMaven is indeed taking the WSJ report into account, and now lists their total as
94,645.
In any event, the appx. 100K figure coincides nicely with my 40K-400K figure, though I can't boast too much since that was a pretty wide range in the first place...
Update: I should also note that to make the spreadsheet less awkward to navigate, I've broken the first 4 weeks out onto a separate worksheet (click the tab at the bottom to view, just like in Excel). Weeks 5-6 (through today) now appear on the main worksheet.
Another important thing to note: It's POSSIBLE--and this would be incredibly stupid, but it's POSSIBLE--that Sebelius will only release the number of enrollments through the FEDERAL WEBSITE alone, not including a) the state-site enrollments (which are likely half of the total) or, possibly b) signups through paper applications, done over the phone, etc, which would be equally stupid not to include.
For instance, it's possible that the actual enrollments will add up to something like:
30K (enrolled via federal exchange via healthcare.gov website)
20K (enrolled via federal exchange via phone/paper applications)
40K (enrolled via state-run exchanges via websites)
10K (enrolled via state-run exchanges via phone/paper applications)
= 100K total
If the numbers are broken out this way, look for the GOP to claim that only the first 30K figure "counts", which is stupid, but what else is new?