Whoa, Nelly.
Here's what I posted yesterday morning:
Today should be a big day in ACA enrollment news. It's the deadline for January enrollment in 2 more states (Massachusetts and Washington State). More to the point, the HHS Dept. is expected to release their 5th weekly "snapshot" report. This should be a big one, since it runs through 12/19, meaning it includes the big December 15th deadline which impacted all 37 states being run through HC.gov this year.
I don't know whether they'll just give the weekly numbers (through Friday the 19th) or if they'll also give a 12/15 number (remember, either one would be for HC.gov only, not including the 14 state-based exchanges).
I also don't know how they plan on reporting the millions of autorenewals which should have kicked in on Tuesday the 16th. If the snapshot runs through the 19th, they may be included in the "snapshot" total. Then again, they may be listed separately, or not at all. For all I know, some will be included but not others (it's possible that they've only processed a portion of them).
In other words, while I expect the reported HC.gov total through the 19th to be around 5.83 million QHP selections, that assumes that all autorenewals via the federal exchange are included. If they aren't, that number could be way "off" even if it proves accurate once all the dust settles.
It's also possible that instead of (or in addition to) the simple "weekly snapshot", HHS might even come out with the first fully-detailed monthly report like they did last year, which breaks the numbers out by state. If so, today will be very busy indeed.
Of course, even if they do so, I'm not sure if it will cover the full first month (11/15 - 12/15), which would make sense, or if it will cover the calendar month (11/15 - 11/30), which would be just plain irritating given that over 3 more weeks will have passed.
If they do release a full report (with state exchanges included), I expect the total to be around 1.24 million through 11/30 or 4.7 million through 12/15.
Anyway, it should be another frazzling day here at ACA Signups Central...
Well, they did
not issue the monthly detailed report; that won't be posted until next week.
However, they did issue the weekly snapshot, and it did include all autorenewals (through the federal exchange, anyway). And they did mention (in passing) the HC.gov total as of 12/15 along with detailed 12/19 enrollments.
For 12/15, the HC.gov total was 3.4 million, vs. my estimate of 3.52M, so I was over by about 3.5%.
However, through 12/19, the total was...
—BREAKING: 6.4M QHPs as of 12/19 w/1.9M Renewals...on HC.gov ONLY!!
Wowzers. My estimate of 5.83M was under by about 9%. Details at the link, along with this follow-up:
—7,438,851 CONFIRMED QHP selections nationally; at least 6.3M renewals / 6.7M total
Some other state-level data came in after that, so I had to take a breather...
—Massachusetts: 67.7K QHPs, 117K Medicaid confirmed, PAYMENT DEADLINE EXTENDED
—Michigan: Holy Crap. Medicaid expansion now up to as much as 5% more than total eligible
...but after I had a chance to crunch the HC.gov numbers some more, I made a decision:
—Yes, I'm bumping up my January AND February enrollment estimates. HOWEVER...
In short, I'm bumping up my 12/23 estimate again from 8.1M to 8.65M, and increasing my 1/15 projection from 9.0M to a whopping 9.75M.
However, for now at least, I'm holding the 12.5M 2/15 figure steady. Details at the link.
In the end, here's how this all looks on the revised (again) Graph:
UPDATE: As an aside, I just wanted to thank the entire dKos community--but Markos and crew in particular--for all of the support that you guys have shown throughout the ACA Signups experience. Between the generous fundraiser, the reposts/retweets/etc and of course the "core crew" who helped provide enrollment data last fall when it was almost impossible to come by, I owe all of you bigtime.
Here's a trip in the Wayback Machine to October 11, 2013 when the idea for the project first arose:
Seriously, though, HHS should really start releasing the official (accurate) numbers of actual signups for all 50 states (or at the very least, the 36 states that they're responsible for) on a daily--or at least, weekly--basis. I don't care if it's a pitifully small number. 100,000? 10,000? 100? 10? Even if it's in single digits, release the damned numbers. Be upfront about it. Everyone knows by now how fucked up the website is, so be honest and just give out the accurate numbers as they come in.
I registered the domain name "obamacaresignups.net" the next day (later changed to "acasignups.net"...not because I'm opposed to using the "O" word but because "ACASignups.net" just rolls off the tongue easier).
The rest is history.