The fall offensive has begun. It is now claimed McObamacare has now served 7 million!
More than seven million people enrolled in ObamaCare by the March 31 deadline, topping the White House’s initial goal, the administration said Monday.
Press secretary Jay Carney opened his daily briefing on Tuesday by saying the enrollment figure was 7,041,000.
“Today we can say definitively, that at midnight last night, it’s fair to say we surpassed everyone’s expectations, at least everyone in this room,” Carney said.
More people could be added to that number, since the administration is allowing consumers who were unable to complete their applications to continue the process beyond Monday. The total also does not include data from the last day of enrollment for states who run their own exchanges.
It’s not clear how many people have paid their first premium under the healthcare exchanges, though Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, quoting insurance industry officials, said 80 to 90 percent of enrollees had done so.
But have the newly insured done so? A heretofore unknown study says otherwise:
But while he took great pains to enphasize that the number would grow – saying ‘we’re still waiting on data from state exchanges’ – he dodged tough questions about other statistics that reporters thought he should have had at the ready.
Those numbers included how many Americans have paid for their insurance policies, and are actually insured. Also, he had no answer to the thorny question of how few signups represented people who had no insurance before the Affordable Care Act took effect.
Numbers from one study, a RAND Corporation effort that has been kept under wraps, suggests that barely 858,000 previously uninsured Americans – nowhere near 7 million – paid for new policies and joined the ranks of the insured by Monday night.
Most of the sign-ups are those who already did have coverage and few of the new sign-ups were previously uninsured:
Aside from the issue of the numbers’ likely decrease when non-paying enrollments are taken into account, administration officials have been coy about a RAND Corporation study that shows relatively few Obamacare enrollees were previously uninsured.
‘What I can tell you is that we expect there to be a good mix of people who were previously uninsured who now have insurance,’ White House press secretary Jay Carney said Monday.
‘Certainly, there’s a significant number who now have qualified for Medicaid in those states that expanded Medicaid who will have insurance who didn’t have it before.’
But the Affordable Care Act carried with it the promise of covering ‘every American,’ and it appears to have fallen tremendously short.
The RAND study, which has not been published – only the Los Angeles Times has seen it – found that just 23 per cent of new enrollees had no insurance before signing up.
And of those newly insured Americans, just 53 per cent have paid their first month’s premiums.
If those numbers hold, the actual net gain of paid policies among Americans who lacked medical insurance in the pre-Obamacare days would be just 858,298.
I just watched Obama take a victory lap and dun Republicans in the process:
“I don’t get it,” Obama says. “Why are folks working so hard for people not to have health insurance? Why are they so mad about folks having health insurance?”
“There are still no death panels. Armageddon has not arrived. Instead this law is helping millions of Americans.”
Obama warned that “history is not kind” to those who stood in the way of American progress.
Obama said that he wouldn’t talk away from the alleged 40 million uninsured but he just did. Obama claims victory with 1.5 million uninsured signed up and only half of them paid a premium.
To get that Obama blew a billion dollars on a garbage website. Premiums are going up next year and many can expect sticker shock.
Obamacare performance is well below projections:
Hard Truth #2:Performance is Well Below CBO Projections
So is 7.1 million fewer uninsured a job well done or something in need of drastic improvement? The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office has been the official “scorekeeper” for Obamacare since well before it was even passed. I see no reason not to use CBO projections of coverage as the basis for determining how well the law is doing at this juncture. Indeed, using CBO projections arguably will make the law look far better than it would otherwise, since the CBO has rather drastically scaled back its expectations for the law since 2010. CBO’s estimates of the number of uninsured we might have expected to see in 2014 absent the law have fluctuated over time. So the fairest comparison is to measure performance against the projected percentage reduction in the total number of uninsured who we would have in 2014 were the law not enacted.
As someone said, if you fire 20 people and hire back 18 of them you didn’t create 18 new jobs.
Obama said that history is not kind to those who stood in the way of American progress. Neither is it kind to galactic liars. Despite all the Obama bullshit 38 million uninsured still remain.
This is not success.
DrJohn has been a health care professional for more than 30 years. In addition to clinical practice he has done extensive research and has published widely with over 70 original articles and abstracts in the peer-reviewed literature. DrJohn is well known in his field and has lectured on every continent except for Antarctica. He has been married to the same wonderful lady for over 30 years and has three kids- two sons, both of whom are attorneys and one daughter on her way into the field of education.
DrJohn was brought up with the concept that one can do well if one is prepared to work hard but nothing in life is guaranteed.
Except for liberals being foolish.