The president will address the nation Monday regarding the problems surrounding ObamaCare enrollment. On Saturday, the Obama administration announced the creation of 476,000 applications, but the ObamaCare enrollment numbers are even worse then they seem.
Until next month, the Obama administration is refusing to release the number of people who have actually completed the process of choosing and enrolling in a health plan. As of now, what we know for sure is that the 476,000 figure is nowhere near the number the system needs to avoid the “death spiral” that threatens to topple the whole law. We also know that those numbers contradict other reports and studies.
One report claimed that ObamaCare enrollment was maybe only 7K the first day and 50K — if the administration was lucky — for the entire week. They were tipped off by workers inside the Health and Human Services Department, who were raising the flag already.
The Advisory Board, a business group that tracks health industry developments, added up the state figures available as of Friday and found that only 192,000 people had applied, and roughly 55,000 had selected a health plan, although not all of them had paid in advance for the plan, thus enrollment wasn’t even completed.
If it wasn’t for the states, then the ObamaCare enrollment would be a total disaster, as opposed to the almost-total disaster it has been thus far. But no matter what the president says tomorrow or whatever new figure he may throw out, White House officials are “very concerned” about not meeting the administration’s goals and necessities.
The administration needs at least 7 million people to have completed the ObamaCare enrollment and purchase coverage through the exchanges by the end of March, and they hope to have millions more on Medicaid. But every expert concedes that these numbers will be front-loaded by people who are not healthy, whom of which have been previously denied coverage due to pre-existing conditions. They simply cannot afford to have healthy people — who are the backbone of the system — get frustrated from the inability to navigate HealthCare.gov.
Even when people do manage to choose a plan, insurers and consultants have said that the federal government is having trouble transmitting accurate and consistent information about who is signing up for which health plan. That is a tell-tale sign that the online system is flawed on the back end, not just at the consumer entry point or server failure due to traffic.
Furthermore, the difference between enrollment and completed applications can be obfuscating, giving the impression that a certain number of people are signing up when they aren’t, which makes all the difference between failure and success.
Another complete disaster for the administration will soon no longer give the administration the ability to pretend as if the program is seeing such high interest. Duplicate enrollment was a common occurrence, resulting from widespread encounters with a cyber wall by users of HealthCare.gov. Even if only 1 out of 5 users or enrollees made such a mistake, then the administrations figure of 476,000 would be cut down to 380,800. Not to mention, the number of healthy people in that pool would be far from sufficient — millions short — from reaching their goal.
Insurance premiums would skyrocket even more than they already have been, with more and more younger, healthy and necessary Americans choosing to opt-out of the program, altogether.
House Republicans are turning up the heat on Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to answer for problems with the ObamaCare website in its opening weeks.
“Ultimately, Secretary Sebelius will testify,” Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., the chamber’s No. 2 Democrat, told “Fox News Sunday.”
For now, it is clear that the Obama administration is doing what it does best, duck and cover and hope a complacent media loses interest until they can package together their story. But unless they turn around the program, not to mention their politics, the failure of this program will be impossible to cover up.
