“Inexcusable”: Administration Over-Counted Obamacare Sign-Ups by 380,000

The media seems to think that Obamacare’s second open enrollment is going just swimmingly. (How could it be going worse than last year’s?)

Unfortunately, the Administration still isn’t counting last year’s sign-ups accurately. Jonathan Cohn of The New Republic has called the Administration’s over-counting of Obamacare sign-Ups “inexcusable“. And that’s from one of Obamacare’s biggest fans.

What happened is that the Administration counted 400,000 dental-only plans as Obamacare plans. On November 10, the Administration announced that 7.1 million people signed up for Obamacare as of the end of October, but that included the dental plans. The correct figure is only 6.7 million. And this figure was not disclosed by the Administration, but dug out by Republican Congressional staffers.

That forces me to re-write my previous skeptical analysis of the Administration’s expectation that 9.0 to 9.9 million people will have signed up for Obamacare by the end of the second open enrollment next February. Obamacare exchanges signed up 8.1 million people during the first open enrollment, which ended last spring. The figure dropped over 1.4 million by the end of October. So, having lost over 17 percent of beneficiaries from the first open enrollment, the Administration expects to add one third (2.4 million) people to the diminished number of current beneficiaries.

To put in another way, the Administration has to drag the missing 1.4 million back into Obamacare, and then go on another Million Man March to hit the bottom of its target. We will see.

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