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Obamacare’s Most Engaged States

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The Daily Beast crunched data from more than a dozen state-run online health-care exchanges to find out where people seem to be the most interested in getting insured. Vermont, you win! By Brandy Zadrozny.

The Federal rollout of health-care exchanges was a well-covered mess. But at least the government could boast plenty of interest—nearly three million people tried to access the site on its first day. Less well-covered has been the rollout of state-run exchanges, which can potentially offer coverage for some 16 million Americans.


To see how well these are faring, The Daily Beast analyzed data from the 11 states that are running their own systems and are already beginning to report results on site traffic. We then compared the number of unique site visits to the number of potential insurance buyers in each state (defined by the Kaiser Family Foundation as the number of uninsured and privately insured adults ages 19-64) in order to gauge citizen engagement.


The results are early, but fascinating. For example, while Vermont is the state with the fewest uninsured residents, it's also the state in which people appear to be most eager to get insured: There are 74,300 potential buyers, and the site has seen 68,000 unique visits, suggesting that 90 percent of the market has already started investigating. In contrast, in California, the state with the most uninsured residents, only 1.6 million visitors—just 20 percent of the state's potential market—have gone to the state's marketplace.


Below is a list of the most updated data available for 11 states, including the potential market size and the unique visits to the exchange's site. We listed three key variables, where available: the number of accounts that have been created; the number of applications that have been started or processed; and the number of people who have been insured. When the information has not been reported, the field was left blank. Hawaii, Oregon, New York, and DC are not included due to lack of available data. New Mexico and Idaho are using the federal portal until their sites are fully developed next year.



Note: California officials have not reported the number of applications submitted. Data below is "applications started," which could include partial submissions.

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