(This is an updated repost of my diary from Friday):
As many of you know, I've been tracking ACA applications (including Medicaid enrollments) since the beginning of October, helped by a dozen or so fellow Kossacks.
I've posted frequent updates here.
The reason I had been including both applications as well as actual enrollments is because most of the reports didn't bother to distinguish between the two. Plus, the actual number of completed applications do serve a legitimate purpose as well (for instance, we know that as of 11/02 there were an additional 900,000 applications in the hopper, ready for plan selection).
However, with the release of the official enrollment numbers for the first 33 days (10/1 - 11/2), it seems a bit pointless to continue with the applications as well. Therefore, I'm making a major change to the spreadsheet.
Going forward, whenever possible I'm going to only be listing actual enrollments for each state. In this sense, my numbers will more closely parallel EnrollMaven.com, an openly anti-ACA website that's also been tracking Obamacare signups.
I was highly skeptical of EnrollMaven for the first few weeks, especially since their definition of an enrollment didn't appear to include Platinum Exchange plans, for some reason. However, a few days ago they corrected this (and frankly, I never understood how they could possibly know which type of plans people were enrolling for anyway) and their methodology otherwise seems to be sound. In addition, they've at least been completely frank about their negative opinion of the ACA, and many of my sources have turned out to be identical to theirs, so I've grown pretty comfortable with using them as a cross-check on my own numbers.
However, there's still a few important differences between their site and ObamacareSignups.net:
--I'm continuing to include Medicaid and SCHIP enrollments, which they don't track; this is still a crucially important factor, both for the success of the ACA as well as from a purely humanitarian POV
--Their site is poorly laid out, requiring you to scroll endlessly to find the states, and they only list the most recent number for the day instead of showing any trend lines or alternative sources
--Since I'm using a Google Docs spreadsheet, you can easily export/copy the data to Excel or whatever to do what you will with
--They sort the states by Federal-run and State-run; I've marked the state-run sites as such (blue rows), but have kept them alphabetical for easier tracking
Having said all of that, here's the latest figures as of Sunday, Nov. 17:
Total Exchange ENROLLMENTS: 150,381
Total Medicaid/SCHIP Expansion: 438,526
Total Combined: 588,907
It's important to remember that this does NOT mean that only 44,000 more people have been signed up since the beginning of the month--this only represents new numbers from 8 states (I've bold-faced them...California, for instance, added another 24,000 between 11/2 - 11/12).
Now, EnrollMaven had the total at around 50K just before the HHS report came out; the total ended up being more than double what they had listed. If that holds true this month, it suggests that November enrollments will be at least 2x that of October (200K+, or 300K+ total). Still sucky, but still a huge improvement and an upward trend.
As an illustration: If the number of actual enrollments doubles each month, that would be 100K + 200K + 400K + 800K + 1.6M + 3.2M = 6.3 million people by 3/31/14, very close to the 7 million goal. And this trend was far greater in Massachusetts when they launched Obamacare RomneyCare; only 123 people enrolled the first month; by the 4th month it was up to 15,500.
Another thing to bear in mind: Even if the HC.gov site continues to suffer, if the state state-run exchanges continue to pick up the slack (well, except for Oregon and Hawaii, which both also have serious issues), it should be noted that those 14 states (+DC) represent 1/3 of the 50 million uninsured people in the country.
Anyway, I'm asking my helpers here at dKos to continue scouring state government reports, twitter feeds and news reports for state-by-state enrollment updates (both the exchanges as well as Medicaid).
ObamacareSignups.net
A couple of other related notes:
The latest updates for Vermont and Colorado (both of which were helpfully provided by ArcticStones, thanks!) are both useful examples of how frustrating it can be to see sloppy (or at least incomplete) journalism.
For instance, the Vermont article states that "As of Friday afternoon, 15,150 Vermonters had set up an online account and 4,100 picked a plan through the website." However, it doesn't break the 4,100 figure down by Private or Medicaid accounts. Since the official HHS numbers from a week or so earlier were roughly 48% to 52%, I'm keeping them roughly the same ratio until I receive better data otherwise.
For Colorado, the article--dated 11/12, a day before the HHS report--says that:
"Nearly 40,000 Coloradans signed up for health coverage on the state's new marketplace, Connect for Health Colorado, rather than HealthCare.gov.
And, Birch says, most of those people who signed up through the website enrolled in Medicaid.
So while Colorado has been enrolling only about a thousand people a week in new private health insurance since its Obamacare marketplace opened, the number enrolling in Medicaid is 10 times that."
This lines up perfectly with the HHS figure of 3,736 Private enrollments for Colorado as of 11/2. "10x Medicaid" would mean roughly 36,000 Medicaid enrollments; add that to 3,736 and you indeed get "nearly 40,000" total.
Meanwhile, judging from not one, not two, but three different diaries posted by three different people yesterday, the Healthcare.Gov website may finally be coming into focus:
Enrolled! How I got unstuck and learned to love the ACA again
We Are Enrolled!
Healthcare.gov is working great!
All three of these are on top of Friday's diary by ericlewis0 about the progress being made:
Healthcare.gov Errors Now BELOW 1%
So, things seem to be looking up.
In the meantime, both of my own HC.gov accounts appear to have to be scrapped. My wife and I will give it a 3rd shot this week.
UPDATE: OK, I was planning on waiting until next week to start this, but after several request, I've started a visual chart/graph of the signups, using the HHS Dept. report from last week as a starting point:
Oh, and just to keep things realistic, here's the same chart scaled out to the actual stated 7 million enrollment goal by the end of the 3/31/14:
Update x2: OK, looks like the Massachusetts number was off by several thousand; I was still carrying forward Applications. The actual enrollments is being reported as about 800, so the total is now back to just over 150K.
Ironically, this is the only case in which my number is actually lower than that of EnrollMaven--they're reporting it as the higher 5K number even though they have an ultra-strict definition of what counts.