Charles Gaba's blog

 Yesterday I noted that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has published a new database which updates the official effectuated ACA exchange enrollment data for all 50 states (+DC) through February 2026.

This means that I finally have comprehensive effectuated enrollment data for the first two months of the year for every state, as opposed to only having Open Enrollment Period (OEP) plan selections, which aren't the same thing.

While there are still four months of effectuated enrollment data missing, this still fills in a lot of the missing pieces of the year over year enrollment puzzle, since this new database also includes state-level effectuations from August - December 2025 as well (previously I only had the national total for those months).

A year and a half ago, just one day before Donald Trump was sworn in as President for the second time, I posted the a passage from near the beginning of George Orwell's 1984:

But actually, he thought as he re-adjusted the Ministry of Plenty’s figures, it was not even forgery. It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another. Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connexion with anything in the real world, not even the kind of connexion that is contained in a direct lie. Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version. A great deal of the time you were expected to make them up out of your head.

For example, the Ministry of Plenty’s forecast had estimated the output of boots for the quarter at 145 million pairs. The actual output was given as sixty-two millions. Winston, however, in rewriting the forecast, marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for the usual claim that the quota had been overfulfilled. In any case, sixty-two millions was no nearer the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than 145 millions.

REMINDER: Use the drop-down menu above to find the analysis for your state.

IMPORTANT: See the original post in this series for an explanation of the methodology.

Regular readers know that I've been obsessing over the massive increases in both gross as well as net premiums for ACA health insurance policy enrollees being caused by the combination of Congressional Republicans allowing the enhanced federal tax credits to expire as well as other Trump Regime policy changes for well over a year and a half now.

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