New York: Amazingly interactive map of entire state...by zip code!! (Also: NY's #OE2 projection much higher than I thought!)

Hat Tip To: 
Dan Goldberg

Dan Goldberg and his colleagues over at Capital New York are killing it repeatedly when it comes to demographic breakdowns of NY's ACA enrollment. In the past they've provided awesome interactive maps of April enrollments of the entire state (by county) as well as September enrollments of just New York City itself (by zip code). Not just total enrollments, mind you: They've broken them out by QHPs, Medicaid and CHIP.

Considering that NYC has around 400 zip codes by itself, this was no doubt a rather Herculean task.

Today, however, they've gone one step further, with a state-wide map of September enrollments by zip code...and when you include the entire state of NY (not just NYC), you're talking about 2,200 zip codes (!) Excellent job!

The only question I had was that in the accompanying story, it claims that for 2015 the NY exchange (NY State of Health) is expecting an additional 350,000 QHPs, when it was my understanding that they didn't break out the #OE2 increase between QHPs & Medicaid/CHIP. In my own 2015 OE2 projection entry, I said:

New York's exchange enrollment ended up being roughly a 55/45 split in favor of Medicaid. I have no idea how the 40K attrition figure is split between the two, nor do I know how they're expecting that 350K new enrollee number to be broken out (according to KFF.org, NY started out with almost an equal number of residents eligible for each: up to 950K for Medicaid, up to 995K for QHP tax credits), and there's still plenty of each out there to work with, so I'll just assume the same 55/45 split. That would suggest that they're hoping to increase QHP enrollment (which was actually 370,451 last April, according to the HHS report...another 65,000 were kids in NY's unique public/private hybrid "Child Health +" program) to around 511,000 this time around.

I eventually went with a simple 50% increase, which in NY's case would mean around 555K QHPs...a bit higher than the above, but only modesly.

However, at the time, I assumed that the 350K increase was lumping QHPs/Medicaid/CHIP together. 511K would be around a 38% increase. However, according to the CNY article, however (and I've verified this with Goldberg):

But New York, if state health officials are to be believed, could once again be a standout. Donna Frescatore, the executive director of the state's health exchange, predicted that an additional 350,000 people in New York will enroll in a private plan, only slightly below last year's figures.

Wow. I have no idea if they can actually achieve this, but if so it would be fantastic: A 94% QHP increase over 2014.

So, how does that impact my own 12.0 million projection for 2015? Well, if they were to achieve 720K QHPs in NY, that would be about 165K more than my own assumption of roughly 555K. So...I dunno, I guess I should technically bump my national number up to around 12.1 - 12.2 million, but again, wanting to nearly double the enrollments doesn't guarantee that they will. So I'm sticking with 12.0M for the moment.

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