How Many Signed Up for ObamaCare? Time to Bury That Story
The most transparent administration in history has decided to discontinue the monthly Affordable Care Act enrollment reports now that open enrollment is closed.
But while the official open enrollment period is closed, that doesn’t mean that activity on the health insurance exchanges has shut down. People who have experienced a “qualifying life event” — getting a job, having a baby or moving to another state, among others — are still eligible to enroll in an exchange policy.
Meanwhile, other people will be exiting the system — they will get a job that has benefits, marry someone with benefits, or just stop making their payments and go without insurance.
And, of course, voters need to know these numbers in order to evaluate the signature legislative achievement of this administration and the many members of Congress who will be standing for re-election come November.
Wow! This is simply ridiculous. Looking at an article that I found in Forbes, which cites Goldman Sachs’ analysis on Obamacare (Affordable Care Act) http://www.forbes.com/sites/scottgottlieb/2014/03/11/how-many-people-did-obamacare-really-enroll/, the upper estimate is only going to be 6 million, less than the entire population of New York City. I thought this was supposed to help out those at least in the tens of millions?
They were initially aiming to enroll 7 million. However, just because they enrolled doesn’t mean they paid their bills. I think we all expected people to drop out, now we just wait and see if its self sustaining.
I think we already know the answer to that one…
“Meanwhile, other people will be exiting the system — they will get a job that has benefits, marry someone with benefits, or just stop making their payments and go without insurance.”
For that reason, I don’t think it really matters how many have signed up. What matters is how many have insurance in the next year. Will it really be that big a bite out of the original uninsured pool of 45-50 million? What also matters is how many are actually getting medical care.
And will the ones who have insurance be high cost baby boomers or the young invincibles who are supposed to pay for this thing.
The number of people who selected a plan isn’t the same as the number of people who consistently pay premiums on a plan. It would be nice to know that number.
Perhaps that’s why they are discontinuing their reports. They don’t want ObamaCare detractors to have an upper hand.
If they deserve the upper hand, they deserve the upper hand.
That’s not how the liberals think.
When the administration made the decision to count enrollees by the number of people who selected a plan, I wrote that whatever number they came up with would be the number they would stick with no matter what.
“The Obama administration should by now be getting fairly accurate estimates of how many of the 8 million enrollees they reported are actually in the system.”
That is probably the “uh-oh” moment that prompted them to cut back the reports.
They probably also shudder at the utterance of death spiral probabilities arising too.
And the public should be demanding the answer.
It should be no surprise that this administration keeps changing the rules of its own law in order to move the goalposts. They want Americans to celebrate the “successes” of this new law by claiming to have reached their totally arbitrary enrollment figures, but they fail to mention that enrolling is actually a LAW, and thus theoretically not even optional. Plus we know that the sicker are signed up at a higher rate the healthy, thus creating an unsustainable funding mechanism. Oh well, I guess the government can always bail out the insurance companies now once they start to go under due to Obamacare.
“Oh well, I guess the government can always bail out the insurance companies now once they start to go under due to Obamacare.”
Score one for risk corridors!
That will require some insurance companies to profit more than others, then taking their profits to give them to the others. If no one profits, will the money just come out of thin air?
The government “bails out” no one. the taxpayer is the one who pays for the bail out.
Good point, please forgive me thinking like a “Progressive” politician.
Indeed- Obamacare has become quite a conundrum for the handsome young Indonesian actor, Barry Sortero, who plays the president of the United States on TV.