Every day now, I can see the liberal talking heads on television extolling the new found successes and virtues of Obamacare. If it weren’t so gosh darned sad, it would all be funny. Proof of how Americans have been thirsting for this of course can be found in the numbers of those who have visited the website, once it was fixed, and announced for its grand reopening. I can hardly type this with a straight face. Seriously liberal talking heads and pundits, if you want me to consider at all what you’re saying, both now or in the future, you’re going to have to make a valid point at least once in a while.
You passed a law that requires every man, woman, and child, in the land to log onto your website should they not have current coverage, and that further got many of them dropped from their existing coverage, and then touted people cruising your exchanges as proof that they wanted it. That’s sort of like claiming that people pulled over for DUI arrests are proof that Americans want breathalyzer tests based on the number of people who submit to them when prompted by the police. Putting that aside for the moment, there’s more to the story here, in terms of the statistics used anyhow.
From the Wall Street Journal Article:
Most of Washington seems to have bought the White House claim that the 36 federal exchanges are finally working, and glory, glory, hallelujah. But if that’s really true, then what explains the ongoing secrecy and evasion?
On Wednesday the Health and Human Services Department continued its Victorian-era strip tease and allowed a glimpse into the Affordable Care Act’s “enrollment” for November. Out of respect for a free press, reporters ought to boycott these releases because they’re so selective that they reveal little about real enrollment. But we’ll try to parse the data as best we can without the White House high gloss.
A charitable reading suggests that ObamaCare’s net enrollment stands at about negative four million. That’s the estimated four million to five and a half million people who had their individual health plans liquidated as ObamaCare-noncompliant—offset by the 364,682 who have signed up for a plan on a state or federal exchange and the 803,077 who have been found eligible to receive Medicaid.
HHS is boasting of enrollment for November that was four times as high as October, yet 62% of the total was in the state exchanges, some of which are marginally less prone to crashing than the federal version. Then again, 41 states posted sign-ups only in the three or four figures, including eight states that run their own exchanges. Oregon managed to scrape up 44 people. Among the 137,204 federal sign-ups, no state is reaching the critical mass necessary for stable insurance prices.
The larger problem is that none of these represent true enrollments. HHS is reporting how many people “selected” a plan on the exchange, not how many people have actually enrolled in a plan with an insurance company by paying the first month’s premium, which is how the private insurance industry defines enrollment. HHS has made up its own standard.
Insurers know that the hardest part of doing business in the individual market is getting customers to write a check. People are accustomed these days to automatic payroll deductions and the unseen lost wages of employer-sponsored insurance. Many Americans may enroll on the exchange but then fail to pay once they see monthly costs that could range from the equivalent of a cellphone bill if they qualify for subsidies (President Obama’s favorite comparison) to premiums that can exceed $1,000 or huge deductibles for the unlucky who must overpay to finance the insurance of others.
To date, less than 15% of those who selected plans have actually cut the first check to become actively enrolled, which is the industry standard for participation. The White House’s standard is far less stringent, and denotes only successful completion of the shopping cart experience and selection of a plan. The problem of course for the Administration is that the actual bills being sent to the prospective insured are in no way reflective of the quotes being given at the time of selection. “Problems,” with the back end have seen people quoted with figures of up to a 50% discount from the actual bills being sent. Another problem of course is that the deductibles associated with these plans are often not matching up with what has been quoted, or not explained in sufficient detail by the spiffy government obfuscation site. The 15% number by the way is in addition to the net increase in uninsured Americans alluded to in this article. Words of how great this failure is, escape me at the moment.
I have two videos here from PJTV, both of them Trifectas. I guess that if there were a silver lining with Obamacare, and even typing that has made me throw up a little in my mouth, it would be watching every single prediction made by conservatives about what would happen were this crap hole of a law to find itself implemented has proven itself to be true. Less people are covered than were covered without it, and that’s only going to get worse, it costs more at every phase of its implementation, and not one single promise made by those who inflicted this upon us has turned out to be true. This law has proven beyond all doubt that government is never the solution, it is only ever the problem.
Cross Posted from Musings of a Mad Conservative.
Tags: Obamacare
