Ben Shapiro does a good job in highlighting 5 issues that throw a HUGE monkey wrench into the “success” presser Obama had yesterday. This is truly “cooking the books,” and one should note that over 6-million (so-far… lots more coming) have lost their health coverage. Only a million previously uninsured have signed up… the rest are people who had insurance, the bulk of which O-Care cancelled. Destroying healthcare for less than a million people is the definition of success in the liberal mind. Dumb.
“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,” the Daily Mail reports. (Via The Blaze)
- It Doesn’t Measure How Many People Have Actually Paid. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius admitted yesterday that of the 6 million people who had signed up for Obamacare at the time, “What we know from insurance companies…tell us that, for their initial customers, it’s somewhere between 80, 85, some say as high as 90 percent, have paid so far.” In other words, about five million people were signed up. As Aaron Blake of the Washington Post points out, “If between 80 and 90 percent of the six million have paid premiums, the number who are fully enrolled would be closer to five million than to six million.” With the increased number of sign-ups in the last days, that percentage number has likely dropped. This is not an unimportant distinction; insurance will not cover those who don’t pay.
- 7.1 Million Enrollees in the Private Exchanges Doesn’t Mean 7.1 Million Who Were Previously Uninsured. Some five million Americans saw their policies cancelled thanks to Obamacare. Those Americans were forced into the Obamacare exchanges by the government. According to a RAND Corporation study, only 858,000 previously uninsured Americans had actually joined Obamacare. That’s a far cry from 7.1 million. The Congressional Budget Office estimated in March 2010 that 37.3% of all uninsured Americans would gain insurance thanks to Obamacare in 2014. That estimate rose to 38.9% in March 2011. In February 2014, the CBO suggested that in 2014, 22.8% would gain insurance through Obamacare. The actual statistic: 12.5%. In other words, the original estimates were off by approximately 66%.
- The Chief Beneficiaries of Obamacare Have Been Medicaid Recipients and 26-Year-Old Basement Dwellers. There are approximately 6.1 million people who have gained coverage through Obamacare’s non-private exchange program. 4.5 million were beneficiaries of Medicaid expansion, and another 1.6 million 26-year-old “children” were forced onto their parents’ policies. That far outweighs any supposed gains in the private insurance market. As Chris Conover of Forbes writes, “At the end of the day, we appear to have covered 1 in 8 uninsured, but to get to this point, we have disrupted coverage for millions, increased premiums for tens of millions more and amplified the pain even further with a blizzard of new taxes and fees that will end up cost even the lowest income families nearly $7,000 over a decade.”
- The Huge Majority of Those Signing Up Are Getting Subsidies – and Even Those Who Are Subsidized Aren’t Signing Up. In order for Obamacare’s cost structure to work, millions of Americans must sign up to pay inflated prices; that would help pay for the subsidies to cover insurance company costs on those with pre-existing conditions. In March, the Obama administration reported that 83% of those who had signed up were eligible for subsidies. As Robert Laszewski estimates, in the end, just 27% of those who are eligible for Obamacare subsidies nationwide have signed up.
- How Much Will The Numbers Drop? These are all preliminary statistics. We now know that somewhere between 2% and 5% of people who paid their insurance bills in January did not do so in February, to go along with the high percentage of people who signed up and never paid at all (that number in Obamacare success story Washington state, for example, was 39% as of early February).
(The Corner) As GOP looks to regain the Senate this fall, and Charles Krauthammer said they should be “picking through the wreckage that is Obamacare.”
“You cover people with pre-existing conditions, young people up to 26, you are not going to cancel the insurance of the assumed million to a million and a half who have signed up, and you work around that and you do good reforms to be Republican and conservative reforms,” said Krauthammer. If Obama wants to veto those reforms, then he will carry the Democrats into 2016 “in really terrible shape,” Krauthammer explained.
With just under two million people newly insured, Krauthammer questions if the cost of Obamacare was worth it. “The whole idea was about insuring the uninsured, so that’s going to leave about 40 million uninsured,” said Krauthammer.
Six million policies were canceled under Obamacare and millions of people have lost their doctors and hospitals. “The price of this overturning, uprooting, and revolutionizing 1/6th of the economy, the ecosystem of Medicare is staggering, for a million and a half uninsured. Is that the way it should have been done?”
(The above AND below is with a h/t to Daniel over at GP) Not only did Krauthammer go after the White House’s numbers, but Jennifer Rubin over at Right Turn, had this awesome piece:
….According to the U.S. Census Bureau, about 48 million individuals in the United States were uninsured at the end of 2012. The actual number was 47.9 million total uninsured individuals; 9.5 million were non-citizens who are ineligible for Obamacare. This results in a net number of 38.4 million uninsured citizens, 35.1 million native-born and 3.3 million naturalized citizens. . . . It is estimated that nearly three million individuals have signed up for Medicaid for the first time. Let’s assume that all of these individuals gained coverage because of the newly expanded Medicaid program.
McKinsey & Co. conducted a study on enrollment through Healthcare.gov and the state insurance exchanges using data as of Feb. 1. At that time, 3.3 million had enrolled. McKinsey concluded that only 14 percent, or about 500,000 individuals, were “actual uninsured who have actually gained health coverage.” An additional 13 percent of uninsured individuals had signed up for Obamacare but had not paid the premium. Of those who had signed up by that time, 73 percent either had insurance and preferred to choose a plan on the exchange or enrolled because their individual plans were canceled.
On Thursday, the Obama administration announced that enrollment had reached six million. Using McKinsey’s findings of 14 percent gaining new coverage, only 900,000 previously uninsured individuals will have acquired insurance as a result of the exchanges.
In other words, all Republicans have to do is cover 900,000 new people in a cheaper and less disruptive fashion than Obamacare does and they’ve met the challenge. Heck, you could just give the 900,000 their own doctors and you’d have done the job.
The administration, with much help from the media, has tried a sleight of hand, making the goal of 7 million sign-ups the target. In fact, the goal was to significantly reduce the 30 million number and to make health care more affordable and accessible. And let’s not forget the promise was to do all that while allowing you to keep your plan and your doctor. Surely the GOP can do better, right?
Ouch… when this becomes public knowledge, thee will be hell to pay… just too late.
