With Massachusetts signing up 270k this year for health coverage, the state based marketplaces officially surpassed their enrollment totals from last year.
And folks in CA, NY and DC can sign up until Jan 31!
— Lori Lodes (@loril) January 25, 2018
State based marketplaces (SBMs) are the state run exchanges. The outreach is controlled by the state, the plan arrangement is controlled by the state, and the marketing is controlled by the state. There are negative side effects of a general anti-ACA enrollment messaging environment but the SBMs are mostly being run by states with a local elite political consensus towards making the ACA work as well as possible for that state. SBMs held serve or improved total enrollment.
This is in contrast to the Federally Facilitated Marketplaces (FFMs) or the states that used Healthcare.gov. Enrollment on HC.Gov was down this year and it was down last year. In 2017, HC.Gov states were on pace to meet or slightly beat 2016 enrollment until the administrations changed and the messaging changed (I have just submitted a paper on this). Since then the messaging and outreach has been consistently anti-enrollmemt. Good econometricians can try to disentangle enrollment from pricing changes as many states Silver loaded but the comparison of SBMs vs FFMs will point us in the right direction on the impact of the messaging changes.