Obamacare Enrollments Are Starting to Surge


Over the past 24 hours, I have managed to say not a single word about either Duck Dynasty or Pajama Boy. So what do I get for my reward? This:

HORSEBACK GUESSTIMATE WARNING: Unless it’s hidden away somewhere, California hasn’t released weekly enrollment numbers. But they’ve released numbers for October, and for the first two weeks of November, and then for October+November. Then today they released numbers for the first three days of this week: 13K on Monday, 19K on Tuesday, and 20K on Wednesday. If you put that all together and then take a reasonable swag at filling in the gaps, you get the chart above. It’s not official or anything, but it’s probably not too far off.

And what it shows is that with deadlines finally looming, all those people who have been shopping for the past month or two are finally enrolling at a furious pace. Other states are reporting a similar surge. Obamacare still has a long way to go, but things are definitely starting to perk up.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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