Remember how there were supposedly 38, 41, 50, or 55 million uninsured Americans out there, on the verge of keeling over in the middle of the street, and that’s why we had to let Barack Obama wreck the health insurance industry?
The Washington Post has details about a couple of new surveys which “suggest that just one in 10 uninsured people who qualify for private health plans through the new marketplace have signed up for one – and that about half of uninsured adults has looked for information on the online exchanges or plans to look.”
Yippee! Only half of the uninsured even bothered to look at TrainWreck.gov or its choo-choo line of state exchange disasters, some of which have yet to process an insurance purchase for anyone. And only 10% of them actually bought a policy! That means the rest of that feeble tally of ObamaCare purchases is churn from people who learned the hard way that Obama was lying when he said that thing he said about keeping your plan if you liked your plan. (That’s according to one survey; the other said previously uninsured people made up 25% of ObamaCare shoppers, which isn’t exactly a soaring triumph either.)
It gets better: over half of the previously uninsured polled in these surveys said they haven’t paid their first premium, so their insurance isn’t even valid. The payment rate for the previously insured is said to be somewhere between 80% and 90%. We don’t know for sure, because the Administration won’t tell us. They also claim they’re not keeping careful track of how many ObamaCare customers were previously uninsured. In fact, the online insurance application doesn’t even have a check box to indicate if the applicant is currently uninsured. A hundred thousand bureaucrats, a trillion dollars spent, and nobody remembered to track whether the Affordable Care Act was accomplishing its core mission?
Try chewing on this chunk of bureaucratic fudge:
“We are a looking at a range of data sources to determine how many marketplace enrollees previously had coverage,” said Julie Bataille, director of the Office of Communication in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the HHS agency overseeing the insurance marketplaces. “Previous insurance coverage is an important metric, and we hope to have additional information in the future.”
We’ll have to look at a range of data sources to figure out whether we’re meeting this important metric, and we hope to have a slightly better thumbnail guesstimate for you at some time in the future. Call us, maybe.
If you’re wondering how many people are accepting President Obama’s invitation to ignore his idiotic law for a couple of years and buy insurance outside the exchanges… well, you’re out of luck, because the Health and Human Services gremlins aren’t tracking that, either, even though officials agree “it is a really important question because obviously the goal is to get as many people insured as possible.”
For the ObamaCare bureaucrat, ignorance is bliss. Evidently the uninsured Americans offered a chance to buy overpriced mandate-festooned insurance policies from ObamaCare’s buggy exchanges feel the same way.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.