Obamacare... by the numbers
The Obama administration and some leading Democrats took something of a victory lap last week after revealing that they had achieved a target of “enrolling” about 7 million people in Obamacare by Monday’s open enrollment deadline.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi put a smiley face on the outcome, which did exceed expectations of many skeptics.
“We just had to protect it from those ideological anti-government people who didn’t want to see it succeed — for ideological, or political or whatever those reasons are,” she said.
Well, not so fast, Nancy. It’s more than way too early to be declaring any kind of success with this law. For starters, anyone with a half-tuned thinking cap should be questioning the veracity of the 7 million enrollment figure, and whether that number truly is a meaningful threshold that portends the law’s long-term success.
The New York Times is reporting that of those who are supposedly enrolled, at least 20 percent of those have not paid to activate their coverage. Then there is plenty of speculation about those who may drop coverage in months to come.
The Washington Post, meanwhile, has pointed out that the numbers include “duplicate enrollments,” and that the overall enrollment number includes “false start” applications.
Then we get to the underlying intended purpose of Obamacare — providing insurance for the previously uninsured. The most widely referenced survey on this issue found that only 27 percent of those who obtained insurance through Obamacare were previously uninsured, and only 53 percent of those paid their first premium.
That translates to just about 1.7 percent of the estimated 48.6 million uninsured.
So who has been signing up for Obamacare? It’s pretty obvious that a big share of the enrollment has involved people who had their insurance canceled because their policies didn’t live up to Obamacare requirements.
And many of those folks are finding they are paying considerably higher premiums for policies with higher deductibles, policies that require them to have benefits they don’t want or need, and policies that do not allow them to continue seeing their doctor or choose their preferred hospital.
No doubt, there will be more uninsured people enrolling in Obamacare in the future. However, the Affordable Care Act’s success will also be measured on its titular claim: Did it make insurance and health care more affordable for most people and not just those who qualify for subsidies or Medicaid.
If it doesn’t, it will have failed on that claim, and if people do not find affordable insurance, they won’t purchase it. That’s the true Achilles’ heel in the Affordable Care Act.
There are many people, of course, who still gag at the thought of the federal government attempting to coerce them into buying something. There is a libertarian slice of society, or whatever you want to call it, that just isn’t going to buy into Obamacare. Matt Drudge of “Drudge Report” fame represented this demographic pretty succinctly two weeks ago when he publicly declared that he was going to pay an IRS penalty in lieu of participating in Obamacare, calling the penalty his “liberty tax.”
Last week’s enrollment numbers are not really big news, nor do they signal vindication of the Affordable Care Act.
The real numbers to pay attention to will be the actual paid enrollment figures reported by the insurance industry, and verifiable cost increases that insurance consumers are actually faced with.
Editorials represent the majority opinion of the Daily Inter Lake’s editorial board.