On the one hand, there was some great news today. Hawaii and Maryland blew away my expectations. Washington State didn't end up doing as lousy as I had feared. And in the end, 60% more people had selected a policy than had done so as of March 31st last year. The site was also linked to from--simultaneously--MSNBC, MSN, Time, the Washington Post, Daily Kos, USA Today, CNBC and CBS News. I received a generous donation (thank you! you know who you are!).
On the other hand, all the simultaneous traffic (along with some other issues) caused the server to crash. I had to migrate the site to a different server, meaning that depending on how your browser and ISP cache settings are configured, you might be looking at two slightly different versions of the site....meaning a couple of the newer links may or may not appear on your browser properly.
In addition, my kid is on mid-winter break, and I was supposed to spend the afternoon playing with him. The server issues couldn't be ignored (not just because of ACA Signups, but my other clients as well), so I had to take a rain check with him for most of the day, which blows. Worst of all, one of the clients impacted today, who also happens to be a friend of mine, is dealing with a serious illness in the family and certainly didn't need to deal with server problems today.
Then, this evening there was another hit: If you haven't heard already, I'll break it here first: Sunday evening's total ended up being 11.4 million QHP selections. This is a whopping 400-500K fewer than I had been hoping for at that point, even taking Saturday's IRS verification outage into account.
Yes, I realize that this is still awesome, but on a personal pride level it kind of bummed me out. On the up side, as you'll see in the 2nd to last link, at worst, this means that I ended up being precisely as accurate as the HHS Dept. itself, without their $700 Billion budget :)
Overall, however, I'm just plain exhausted, and more than a little depressed tonight.
--#ACAOvertime: No Sleep 'til Brooklyn: Deadline Extension Roundup (UPDATE x7)
(in the end, only Kentucky decided to stick to a "no exceptions" policy)
--Hawaii: Holy Smokes: 23K QHPs for 2015 (and announces "wait in line" extension)
--Maryland increases QHP enrollments by 89% over 2014:: 119K QHPs thru 2/15
--Massachusetts: 130K+ QHPs estimated, 252K Medicaid confirmed
--BREAKING: Republicans Release Contingency Plan for King v. Burwell Ruling!!
--California: 1.42 Million QHPs thru 2/15, 3.0M+ newly added to Medicaid
(this should've set off red flags all over, but I was too focused on the server issue to deal with it at the time...see below)
--YES, I'M AWARE OF THE SERVER SPEED ISSUES.
--Crud. I overshot by 4%: 11.4 Million QHPs as of 2/15. Now calling for 11.8M by 2/28.
Ouch. So, what went wrong? Well, nothing, really; the final surge just didn't end up being as dramatic as I had hoped/expected after all, and the IRS outage on Saturday put a huge drag on things during the most critical portion of the enrollment season.
As for specific states, the next (final?) HC.gov "weekly snapshot" should be released tomorrow, which will give insight into most of the other states...but as noted above, California is the most obvious trouble spot:
--California makes up about 1/3 of my "missing" enrollees
As a result of all of this, here's the revised, more humble Graph: