No surprises here. The Administration has been assiduously lying about how many of those ObamaCare “enrollees” actually paid their premiums and secured valid insurance policies. The claim that payment totals are an impenetrable mystery has always been ludicrous; even the crudest hand-administered paper system would be able to provide numbers.
Team Obama has lied repeatedly about this because the number of unpaid policies is profoundly embarrassing for them; it would dynamite the claims they’ve been making about enrollment, which weren’t so great to begin with. Remember, Obama Strategy 101 is to tell whatever crazy story it takes to win the current news cycle, and the next one, keeping bad news hidden until the President’s surrogates can begin shrieking the real story is “old news” and asking “what difference does it make?” This strategy is carried out in the serene confidence that the media will never dig very hard to find the real answers, or invite the American people to grow outraged over the Administration’s mendacity.
So here we are, at the end of January 2014, and the truth about those enrollment numbers is beginning to seep out. From CNN Money:
Around one in five people who picked health insurance policies on the state and federal exchanges last year haven’t paid their first month’s premiums, according to insurers polled by CNNMoney. These folks will likely see their policy selection canceled and they’ll be left uninsured.
Some 2.1 million people signed up for a plan in time for their coverage to start January 1, according to the Obama administration. But with the payment deadlines stretching until January 31 at the latest, anywhere between 12% and 30% of those folks still haven’t paid up, insurers say.
Most consumers were given until the middle or the end of January to pay their first premium, a necessary step to actually activating enrollment. Exchange officials and insurers repeatedly stressed the importance of sending in that first payment, with some following up with the slackers by phone or letter.
The true enrollment figure likely won’t be known for a few weeks.
That percentage was probably a lot worse during the crucial ObamaCare debacle months of November and December. Imagine what would have happened to Obama if he faced an objective media that was interested in uncovering the truth, and they’d learned half or more of the “enrollments” claimed by the Administration were entirely hypothetical! Imagine if Obama had jetted off to that luxury Hawaiian Christmas getaway with such news added to the already grim ObamaCare tidings! Imagine what would have happened if the Affordable Care Act had been implemented as written, and the payment deadline dates weren’t pushed back a few times!
But happily, he’s got a cheerleader media that would have thrown itself on the actual enrollment statistics like a live grenade, if some whistleblower had threatened to release them. So the Administration told a crazy fib about how, golly gee whiz, no, we don’t know how many checks our Little Partners in the insurance industry have received, and gosh darn wouldn’t you know it, there’s just no way the billion-dollar HHS bureaucracy could spare the people it would take to hold a few conference calls and ask the industry to send in some bank deposit totals, and the media said “wow, bummer, okay,” and that was the end of it.
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