Texas: Baker Institute Survey suggests 760K exchange QHPs as of 3/15...NOT including kids!

Hat Tip To: 
Stevef101

I'm debating whether to actually plug this number into the spreadsheet or not. On the one hand, I'm reluctant to do so without hard official numbers being given (this is just a survey, only runs through mid-March and doesn't include kids anyway).

On the other hand, doing so wouldn't change my total projection of around 7.78 million exchange QHPs; it just reduces the "unsorted" number at the bottom. Plus, I'm almost certain that the March HHS report is going to be released sometime tomorrow (Thursday) anyway, so if I'm wrong, it'll be easy enough to correct it at that point.

In this brief, we track changes in health insurance status in Texas between September 2013 and March 2014. We find that the rate of uninsured adults ages 18 to 64 in Texas declined from 24.8% to 23.5%. The majority of this decline is attributable to an increase in the percent of adult Texans obtaining insurance through an employer. The proportions of adults with either Medicaid or individual private insurance both declined during this period. However, these percentages likely disguise significant changes in insurance coverage in Texas over the time period. By mid-March 2014, an estimated 746,000 Texans had obtained private insurance through the Marketplace. Of these, 178,000 (30.2%) were previously uninsured.  Although a seemingly small proportion of Texans obtained insurance through the state’s Marketplace, the large absolute numbers had a substantial impact on increasing access to insurance coverage in the United States.  

For the record, Texas was at around 295K exchange QHPs as of 3/01, so 760K as of mid-March would be a massive spike (especially since it still doesn't include the late-March surge).

With that in mind, I'm gonna hold off on actually plugging it into the spreadsheet for the moment. We'll see what tomorrow brings...

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