Oldman82;1600924 wrote:Is there anyone, outside of the Whitehouse, that can confirm the 7 million figure? Not inclined to believe whats coming out of of there without some independent confirmation.
I was actually curious about this as well. There is some guy that has been tracking it (acasignups.net). It's clear that he is pretty left-leaning, but he has been doing a good job consolidating data given by the state and federal exchanges. Since the states have been more proactive and transparent about their numbers, I find the trends interesting. I quickly put some numbers in excel to try to make sense of the data; I could have made some entry errors though.
Thus far, 19 states (well 18 plus Washington DC) have provided enrollment numbers through March 31st; 5 states have provided numbers through most of the March; and three states have provided numbers through the first half of March. I figured the 19 states will full data provided a good comparison to the unconfirmed numbers.
- Through February, the 19 states accounted for 2.02 million of the 4.24 million enrolled or 47.6%.
- For March, these same states accounted for .81 million of the 2.86 million enrolled or 28.3%.
- These 19 states enrolled an additional 40% above their totals through February compared to a 67% increase across all states.
- The remaining states had a 92% increase from their totals through February.
Another way to look at this would be to evaluate the daily enrollment from February alone to the daily enrollment in March (I guess this is actually 30 days, March 2nd through 31st). February should provide a baseline of demand for March. Furthermore, I would assume that whatever impact on enrollment the website issues had early on, would either have little to do with the February/March enrollment or both would experience proportional increases in enrollment.
- Across all states, February had a daily enrollment of 33672 while March had a daily enrollment of 95333 for a 283% increase.
- The 19 states had February daily enrollment of 12605 and a March daily enrollment of 27035 for a 214% increase.
- The remaining states had a February daily enrollment of 21068 and a March daily enrollment of 68299 for a 342% increase.
Basically, to reach the 7.1 million enrollment figures, the states with little or no March information (i.e., federal exchange states) would have to significantly outpace the states that have presented enrollment figures and had shown significantly greater demand in prior months. On one hand, one could assume that these states likely had more room for growth; on the other hand, one could also assume that the previous enrollment figures indicate less demand in theses states.
So as you can see, I wasted a lot of time, but the media rarely presents any critical analysis or context to figures of any kind; this always bothers me. I'm not looking for any complex statistical analyses, but they could report enough analysis where we can make some basic inferences about the validity of the figures. Instead, they take the numbers as face value, making asymmetrical information even more asymmetrical.
